We normally think about poverty as being caused by a lack of money. Yet it is quite possible to be rich in terms of money and yet incredibly poor in other areas. My passion is to see a world free from the effects of absolute poverty, a world which doesn’t have a billion people surviving on less than $1 a day. Yet I am very aware that defining poverty is not about numbers and statistics, but about a lack of resources in multiple areas such as capital, earning capacity, freedom, health, faith, education, love, family, companionship and community.
I remember, 20 or so years back visiting Nigeria and speaking to people we would certainly class as extremely poor. I must have appeared to be very rich to them. But there was one particular area where I was poor compared to many of them. I cannot go into details, but no sum of money could rectify one particular situation Christine and I were faced with.
I started blogging just over 2 years ago and try to add one article a week. I write about what I feel passionate about. Most of my posts are categorised as “Justice”, “Compassion” and “Poverty”. Inevitably I touch on politics and am not afraid of being controversial. My articles are influenced by my faith as a Christian but I do not intend to be exclusive and fully appreciate that some of my readers will have other faiths or have no particular faith.
There are 27 Million slaves throughout the world. But before we, in Britain, point the finger we must ask why we tolerate 10,000 or more slaves in the United Kingdom today. We need stronger laws to rank human trafficking alongside kidnapping and murder. We also need more vigilance on the part of the police, officials, social workers and the public as a whole to spot the signs of workers in conditions of restricted liberty.
Twenty five years ago when I was in the development phase of starting a new charity (Kingscare), the general mood among Christians was that helping people at a practical level, though fundamentally ‘a good thing’, was thought to be of secondary importance to preaching the Gospel and getting people ‘saved”. It was an ‘either/or’ thing.
People care deeply about issues of justice, such as sexual exploitation of children, modern slavery, education for all, corruption, unfair trade etc.
God loves justice, and he longs to see a world where there is justice for all. Where the rich and powerful do not exploit the poor and powerless. Where the vulnerable, widows, orphans, disabled and mentally challenged receive fair treatment from the rest of humanity.
Compassion and Justice 