World Perspective

by Mike Wawrzewski

I have become more aware of the overwhelming needs around the world and how inadequate that I am to meet even a portion of these needs. Elizabeth and I have been reading many books but one written by Loren Cunningham titled “Making Jesus Lord” sticks out in our minds. This book brings out facts that I was unaware of. I am a visual person and with each new sentence comes images in my mind of people not more than six hours away (by plane) living on the streets or in some shanty home. Much worse to me was that many of these “people” are children. I have personally seen children living parentless on the streets of Bolivia. Last night alone, six million children laid their heads down to sleep on some cold, in-personable step, park or street corner in South America. As if my mind didn’t have enough to process, I read how many children died from hunger just yesterday, 40,000. I ask myself how can I make a difference with such overwhelming needs. Another statistic that astounded me was that there are over six billion people living in the world today of which 2 billion have never heard the name of Jesus Christ. Do you know how many full-time protestant and Catholic missionaries are out in the world today attempting to reach these 2 billion people? Only 250,000! Do you know how many people each full-time missionary has to personally reach if they are the only ones committing theirs lives to those 2 billion? 8 million people per missionary. An outrageous and unbelievable number. Yet we have more Avon representatives (1.2 million) and Amway distributors (750,000) worldwide. “Missions isn’t just for “weird” people or the “religious zealots”. The Great Commission was given to each and every person who calls themselves a “Born again Christians.” Each one of us is either a missionary or a mission field. Which one are you?