‘Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed.’
Isaiah 54:10
‘You reap what you sow’; ‘what comes around goes around’. Plenty of sayings tell us that people eventually get what they deserve. Problem is, that doesn’t work when you think about all the people who were caught up in the tsunami, or who lost everything in the Pakistan earthquake.
Good things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to good people. Both are unfathomable, and they take us away from the reality of God’s faithfulness.
God is faithful because he can’t be anything else; he’d fall foul of his own ‘trade descriptions act’ if he weren't there for us at all times.
In Pakistan, staff at the Diocese of Hyderabad demonstrate the character of God as they faithfully stand side by side with people who’ve caught tuberculosis.
We, too, are faithful, as we try to demonstrate the character of God. We stick by our friends even on their ‘off’ days when it costs us.
And so does Tearfund. You wouldn’t expect to read that Tearfund had quit because the world’s problems hadn’t gone away yet. Of course we will continue to walk with people as they undertake the long climb out of poverty.
This year, Make Poverty History flung wide the doors for the rich world to better resource its poorer neighbours. Through that doorway, we saw the scale of the need, and the awful consequences of not addressing the causes of poverty. Our hope is that Make Poverty History will have shown more people the need to commit to the long-term fight.
In Tearfund’s publications you’ll read about ‘people who are poor’ rather than ‘the poor’. What’s the difference? ‘The poor’ talks of an anonymous mass; whereas ‘people who are poor’ speaks of God’s highest earthly creations, who are poor now but may not always be.
If God had wanted to give up on creation, he might as well have made The Flood the final chapter. There wouldn’t have been any need to send Jesus all this way unless there was much more in us to redeem than condemn.
Jesus embodies God’s faithfulness. As we hear Wesley’s Hark! the herald angels sing this year, savour the lines: ‘Pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel... born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.’