Our God Is Near

As people of faith, we rejoice that our God is so terribly near.

When we hike through a shaded wood, when we set aside work for a friend in need, when we build a blanket fort with our children, God is near. God is near whenever we celebrate that the word became human in the person of Jesus Christ.

But for all the beautiful ways we encounter the divine, God is also present in darkness and desperation. When refugee families trek endlessly in search of food, when a child goes to school without breakfast, when Tanzanian farmers cannot afford to feed their families, we grieve that our God is so terribly near.

We co-exist with hunger, with war, and with countless other forms of suffering and destruction. Often we even help to perpetuate them.

Yet our faith compels us to respond to God wherever God is present. We meet God wherever our sisters and brothers are hungry - in our streets, in our schools, in the homes of our neighbors all over the world.

We rejoice because God enables us to address hunger at its source! God has given us the means to cut world hunger in half by the year 2015 - and to end it in the 21st century. But to do so, we must direct our efforts at the root causes of hunger....Wherever people of faith work to end the suffering of our hungry sisters and brothers, our God is terribly near.