Let's get a little messy...

Away with your noisy hymns of praise
I will not listen to the music of your harps (strings)
Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice
An endless river of righteous living.
Amos 5:23-24 (parenthesis added)

The first time I saw her, I didn’t have any children of my own.

Ben and I were at the Rock Opera with his youth group from Alamo Heights Baptist church. Some people had just handed out these folders that had African kids’ pictures on them, and Rebecca St. James was on stage talking about an organization called World Vision. I wasn’t really listening.

Instead, I was staring at Kedija Juhar, the little girl a woman had passed to Ben and me. She had brown eyes and wild hair, and I knew we would sponsor her before I even read that she lived in Tanzania and was the “water bearer” for her family and that her father had died of AIDs and that she took care of her brother and sister while her mother tried to find work.

I knew even before I saw that her birthday was the day before Ben’s and my anniversary.

Those eyes…they just wouldn’t let me go.

Six years ago we signed up to send $35 each month to this precious little girl across the ocean. She was 6. Didn’t go to school. Had no drinking water within a five-mile radius. Wore no shoes.

Today, Kedija is 12. Her favorite subject is science, and she’s not so good at math but she’s excelling at her native language. Her community has a well from which they draw water now. She saves her shoes for school.

Moses Mwesige came along in 2005, after we’d signed up to become World Vision Artist Associates. He’s from Zimbabwe, a part of Africa so ravaged by AIDs that World Vision leaders compare it to an “Asian tsunami every six days.” So many places in Africa are the same.

Moses has seen the destruction of the disease. His family has buried sons, daughters, parents and grandparents in the 12 years he’s been alive, and even in a community where death is almost commonplace, it is no less damaging. In his first letter to us, Moses wrote, “Thank you for loving me so much that you would choose to sponsor me.” His words made me cry the day I opened up that dirt-streaked envelope and unfolded the paper stamped with World Vision’s Zimbabwe seal. If I’m really being honest, they still make me cry today because, though simple and sweet, they are at the same time intense and difficult. He saw our love in that paltry $35 we sent every month.

How little I knew of the love that would blister my heart like the scorching dirt in Africa blisters their feet, the same love that would make my heart dance and laugh and sting and cry every time I saw “Zimbabwe” scribbled on an envelope.

How little I knew of its addiction.

We sponsored our third child three months after Jadon was born, when I found a little boy from Peru, Juaquin, who was born the same day Jadon was born in 2006. I saw his face, and I saw my son.

Juaquin is almost 3 now. His colored pictures hang alongside Jadon’s artwork on our refrigerator (which is getting a little crowded by now), and when Jadon’s old enough to write, they’ll be pen pals. When he has his own money, Jadon will help make sure Juaquin has enough to eat.

Philani Lugogo came along a few months later. He’s from a rural community in South Africa. His first picture showed a skinny 3-year-old with melancholy eyes and dirty feet. The picture we got a few weeks ago shows a healthy 5-year-old with smiling eyes and shoes to cover his probably-still-dirty feet. He just started school.

Maureen is the last of our sponsored kids. We just began our relationship with her two months ago, so the only thing I know about Maureen is that her birthday is on the day my grandmother died. Memaw would be glad to know that a little girl’s life was changed so drastically the day she died.

You may be wondering why I’m telling you all of this. Because they are my children. And, just as Jadon and Asa have done, Kedija, Moses, Juaquin, Philani and Maureen have taught me so much over the years.

Namely this: I. Am. Still. Selfish.

It took me a while to realize this, and even longer to admit it, but it’s true.

I eat half my oversized plate at Chili’s and I buy that overpriced organic chicken at H-E-B and I drink that oversweet Starbucks hot chocolate, and I complain about how my budget doesn’t seem to be working out this month. While the millions who live on less than $2 a day eat their beans and rice and, maybe once a week, that piece of almost-rotten fruit and walk those five miles to get that clean water, and they sing “I’ve got this joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart” and they mean it.

I sit in my three-bedroom, 1,988-square-foot house, with its centralized heating and cooling system, and I turn on my wide-screen television with more channels than I’d watch in a lifetime and I grumble about how the honey-colored book shelf that sits in our gameroom will have to be replaced eventually because my sons (and probably husband) have nicked some of the wood with their rough-housing. They sit in their houses made of cardboard or fabric or see-through sheets and thank God that they have shade from the burning sun.

I try to hold on, with cramping fingers, to the bit of comfort I have here…while my children—MY children—across the ocean are starving. Hurting. Dying.

I am so selfish.

So I’ve found myself begging God to break my heart for what breaks his, to show me what else I might do in my little corner of easy living, to make the lives of those millions just a tiny bit easier.

Back in July, Ben and I attended a worship leader’s conference in Leawood, Kansas. The idea that worship cannot be separated from justice had been on our hearts for a while, and it was reaffirmed at the conference.

While there, God urged Ben and me to start working on a project, which we’ve since titled “Heart Like Your Heart Project,” that will effect change in the lives of children and orphans all over the world. Progeny plans to go into the studio in March to record a brand new worship album, with brand new original worship songs, that will release sometime in April or May.

Here’s the important thing, though: all sales of the album will go directly to World Vision. Ten percent of the profits will be distributed to Progeny’s sponsored children, to purchase goats and cows and chickens in order to raise the communities’ economic status for their own good and the good of surrounding communities. The other 90 percent of the profits will go directly to the work of World Vision—building wells, providing food and clothing and shelter and administering health care to the ones who need it most.

Our goal is to sell 10,000 CDs, which will raise $135,000 for the work of World Vision (Visit www.progenyworship for more info on the project and e-mail ben@progenyband.com if you’re interested in hosting a house party or worship concert).

I’ve never been to Zimbabwe or Tanzania or Peru or South Africa. But I have children there. Children who go to bed hungry, children who raise their brothers and sisters because disease stole their parents. Children who want to know that they are worth the sacrifice of my monthly Chili’s tab.

Listen to what Leonard Sweet says in "The Three Hardest Words in the World to Get Right:"

“Everything we do—our learning, our strivings, our dreaming and daydreaming—needs to be shaped by the one in three people who live on less than two dollars per day. We need to be shaped by the ten thousand Africans who die of AIDs, TB and malaria every day, and the fifty million people who die of hunger every year. That’s why the condition of our souls has a direct relation to the condition of our neighborhoods and our nations. Something is wrong when the wealth of some depends on the poverty of others. Something is wrong when the ascent up the ladder for some depends on the descent down the ladder for others.”

Amen, Leonard.

So I say, let us run, dance, walk, limp, whatever it looks like to us, toward God’s heart in caring for the orphan and the widow and the foreigner. Because if we want to see Jesus—and I mean really, really see him—we’ll have to crumple our perfectly-pressed pants and roll up the sleeves of our Tide-white shirts and get a little messy. Because where the dirt-smudged children, the poverty-stricken foreigners and the not-exactly-aromatic homeless are is right where Jesus loves to be.

Break our hearts for what breaks yours, oh God.

(For sneak peeks of three of Progeny’s new worship songs, visit www.progenyworship.com.)