Last week, Kim and I made "mexican food" for one of her photography and English students, and the student's friend.  As we talked, the student's friend shared a moving story with us.  She hasn't seen her mother since she was eight years old; for eight years.  Her mom went to America on a visa and didn't come back.  Instead, she stayed in America illegally to work and earn more money to send home to her family.  They talk on the phone somewhat regularly, maybe once or twice a month.  The girl has next to no memories of her mother; all she is is a voice.  The money her mother sends home has helped support their family and enabled the girl to go to good schools and get a good education, but the cost is obviously far more significant than an annual tuition.  This situation is normal for this girl and for many others like her.

The worship leader in our church's wife left her husband and children for the next year to try to make more money for her family by working abroad in Germany.  With the strength of the Euro hopefully she can come home with more money than she can make here, but in the mean time her husband is left to care for the kids.

Our friend "B" has the best English of any Mongolian we've met.  She's well-educated, cultured, witty, and as tough as you'd expect a single mother to be.  She was recently accepted to a graduate program at the University of Massachusetts to get her Masters degree in International Public Relations.  After spending a lot of money and time applying and interviewing at embassies, "B" has been denied a visa to the US twice because she is adamant about taking her son and, because of that, she is seen as too much of a 'flight risk'.

Many of the Christians here are physically abused or shunned by their Buddhist families when they become Christians.  One of my students at the YWAM base told us the story of him and his wife and about how when she became a Christian her family kicked her out of the house and her father didn't speak to her for years.  Because she became a Christian, she was told that she was "dead" to them.  

One of the new volunteers in town is from a Vietnamese family and her father fought alongside US troops during the war.  Most of her very large family entered the US illegally, most commonly by making the unbelievable journey across the Pacific Ocean in small boats.  Some were caught on sent back, only to try again until they succeeded.  One of her siblings was on a boat who ran out of food while at sea and they were forced to eat one of the deceased passengers.

These stories are not uncommon out here and they are a more shocking reminder of a heart-breaking truth; all over the world people are doing back-breaking work and taking tremendous and terrible risks to obtain what we already have as Americans.

Simply because I was born a white male, to a middle class family, in Southern California means that it's probably safe to say that I have the most options out of any other place or group on the planet.  We so often don't even see the options available to us simply by circumstances bestowed on us and, to our shame, even less of the time we're thankful for them.

Maybe this is a bad analogy, but have you seen Good Will Hunting?  More than likely you have.  Do you remember how people kept telling Will that because of his extraordinary gifts and talents, he owed it to the rest of the people who didn't have such gifts to do something with them?  In terms of standard of living, options afforded us, and many other things, we are like Will Hunting to the rest of the world.  Only, more often than not we just want to flaunt them in bars to impress girls or abuse other people (like Robin Williams' character) with them.  

Our perspective is small, small, small.

As Christians we need to see that.  More so, we don't need to just see the people struggling overseas, we need to see the people struggling in our own cities, neighborhoods, and in our own churches!  We are not called to have such navel-gazing perspectives.  We not even called to have global perspectives.  We're called to have eternal perspectives.

We need an eternal perspective that sees all that God has done in our salvation, and all that He has blessed us with materially and immaterially.  Often times to only see the former causes Christians to stay within the walls of their church, and to only the latter leads Christians outside their walls but absent of the Gospel (which is just empty busy-ness).  We need a balance.  We need to adjust our perspective to see what we already have.  There are probably a lot of questions we can ask but I'll leave you with one: are we really, truly thankful?

Something Paul says in Ephesians has stuck with me for the past year or so.  In chapters 4 and 5 Paul does a lot of contrasting, "do this, don't do this; you were this, now be this".  Here is what he says in chapter 5:

"3 But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. 4 Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving."

Paul's counter to the sin he lists there is thanksgiving.  "Instead of these six sins, be thankful", as though thankfulness is a weapon we can use to fight against sin.  If you go back a little bit into chapter 4 you can see what Paul says we should be thankful for; what we've already received.

Being thankful for what you've received cultivates humility and compassion, and who couldn't use a little more of each of those?

[Edit: I forgot to include this verse: For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not? (1 Corinthians 4:7)]