Checking My Motives

I am going to Ethiopia to teach the rural poor how to drill water wells.

Does that sound pretentious or egotistical?

I've been asking myself lately how to put away pride, specifically that self-applauding narcissism which seems rampant in humanitarian and philanthropical organizations, that which would cause us not to care if the world were saved unless we were its saviors; that which would let our good works so shine before men that they may see us in heaven.

To borrow the Apostle Paul's framework:

Though I bestow several months of my time upon the poor, and though I give my body to be burned beneath an equatorial sun amid intense boughts of well-drilling, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

And though I write of it with the pen of poet laureates and muses, and have not love, I am become as the screenplay for Gigli, or a script for a sit-com that aired only two episodes.

Part of me thinks I can dimiss the problem. Regardless of my spiritual health, people will still get much needed water and - in learning the technology itself - much more needed empowerment. All I would need to do, therefore, is worry about the well-drilling and let my ego go wherever it wants.

Yet something is missing if well drilling is all we care about. It neglects the larger spiritual scheme. Love is not content to help people with mere material blessings, things that allow them only to die comfortably. Love desires them to fully live. This why we engage in holistic ministry. Without Christ's life, humanitarian services become evanescent and vain in the sense of Ecclesiastes. Works without faith are dead.

And because of the ministry's spiritual foundation, because of our life's spiritual foundation, I do worry about my motives. I pray to always preach the Gospel, as has been said, regardless of whether or not I use words, (yet without fear of using words); and that God's Kingdom would shine through me, and therefore inspite of me.

Thus I search for safeguards against self-righteousness, and at the moment I believe I see two of them. May I report people's individual stories, as a reminder that we do not go to amalgamous "Africans" whom we must rescue ("philanthropists love anthropods," one writer has said), but to men and women whom we can love and brothers and sisters for whom we can pray, and who can pray for us.

Second is that Jeremy Boucher and I cannot do this alone, and we do not do this alone. We are taking you with us. We are almost nothing without daily intercession from our fellow saints. Please pray for us. More than anything else, we need prayer, and I mean that. The world may think prayer absurd, and it may throw its temporal wealth and power to fix problems, but may we rely instead on the strength of God's community and his undeserved grace.

So I pray to put the stories of the people with whom we will work ahead of my own. And I pray for humility in recognizing that my part in this ministry is mine only insofar as it is ours, and ours only insofar as it is God's. And so we go to our brethren and neighbors in Ethiopia, with a love that is not our own, praise God!