Pueblo Modelo is a dry, dust blown collection of shacks in Guatemala. Over 2,000 extremely poor families call it home. World Help is working to bring total transformation to this village and in January I was there with my daughter Noel and a team from World Help.
Hundreds of the desperate villagers surrounded our group as we distributed food and water. But one mother followed our group all the way across the village. She was pulling her nine-year-old daughter Margarita by the hand with a determined look on her face. She made her way up to Noel and pleaded for help in Spanish. The mother was so insistent and her daughter so distressed that Noel asked for a translator and listened as the mother began to tell her daughter’s heart-breaking story.
Margarita had been raped. The resulting complications were life threatening for the little girl. Her internal organs had been badly damaged and she needed reconstructive surgery right away.
Noel and many of the women immediately surrounded Margarita to comfort and pray over her. We knew that we had to help with surgery. How could we as Christians look into this girl’s eyes and only give her our heartfelt sympathies and best prayers? We can’t when God has given us the means to do more! Right then we committed to her surgery believing that God would provide the funds.
Looking out into the masses of people in Pueblo Modelo, I could imagine what Jesus felt. So many have desperate, life threatening needs. Thinking about the ones that can’t receive help immediately could have been depressing or led to a sense of failure. But you know what? God brought that helpless, hurting girl to us and said, “Help this one!”
In his book, Just Courage, author Gary A. Haugen puts a singular human face on the millions of hurting in our world.
While the Bible does not teach that we will prevail in every battle against injustice on this earth, it does teach us that God will prevail in the ultimate war, that He goes with us into every battle, that He brings His power and protection to bear on our behalf, and that He will prevail in all battles necessary to the ultimate triumph of His kingdom. In a world of groaning injustice, these are the truths that Jesus invites His followers to believe – and act on.
I don’t know if Jesus actually rolls His eyes, but that is what I picture Him doing every time He hears “realistic” and “mature” Christians give fourteen reasons why there is nothing we can do to stop violence and injustice. I think He is very sympathetic to our honest fears. But I think He is just annoyed when those fears are dressed up in a sophisticated analysis of why nothing will work. He’s understandably irritated, I think, because He hears us simply regurgitating the ancient, tired nostrums of the father of lies, who for millennia has been making one simple argument, namely, that what God has plainly said about Himself, the world and history isn’t true. Since God can’t be trusted, we, the enlightened ones, will figure out this dangerous world for ourselves.
For these reasons, while our arguments against the impracticality of doing justice are understandable, they are ultimately not very interesting to Jesus. Nor are they very helpful to the slave boy or to the prisoner being tortured or to the widow brutally thrown off her land. Imagine yourself enslaved in a rice mill or handcuffed on a concrete floor or violently chased from your home, and then picture yourself listening to millions of Christians explain why there is nothing they can do to help you. Wouldn’t such explanations be infuriating? Mostly because they would be, for the most part, untrue. Wouldn’t you long to hear someone – anyone – speak up and say, ‘Wait! We may not be able to do everything, but can’t we help this one?”
Over the years, I have heard so many reasons by different people on why they don’t think they can make a 
difference. Some just think the problem is too big . . . so why try? But every single one of those reasons crumble to the ground in the face of the single life that God places before us, that we are responsible for helping.
A donor provided the necessary funds and Margarita had her surgery this past Tuesday. Her recovery will take time but the doctors believe she will be fully healed and lead a normal life. She will need continued care but her life has changed completely.
And just as Haugen wrote, I know that we may not be able to help every single person in Guatemala, but I do know that we helped this one. And we will continue to help the ones until they add up to the many.