All About US: Motivation

I've posted a couple times here about visiting a poor community and conducting interviews there. We're doing it as research for our thesis, which we'll write together in the next few months. As an aside, it's such a fun blessing to be able to do school and ministry together with my husband. So, I was talking to my parents a few days ago, and they both asked what exactly we are doing, and I thought it would be good to explain exactly what we're doing for this internship/research for the long dreaded :) thesis!

Because we're followers of Christ, we want to make sure that whatever we do we're acting as Christ did and would do if he were still on earth now. So, when we think about doing community development we can't separate our understanding of Christ's work from our theory that motivates our actions in the community. We'll continue to explain what we're doing, but thought we should start with just a small piece of our whole theological framework regarding work in the community.

Whatever views one has regarding poverty and the causes of it, we can't ignore the many verses in scripture regarding the poor (don't just take our word for it, look yourself!). We're taking a class on the Prophets right now and there's soooo much there about God's views on how we should treat the poor in this section of the Bible.. The people of God were punished by the Assyrians and Babylonians because (1) they had been unfaithful to their God and (2) how they were treating each other, especially the poor and oppressed among them. Here's just one passage in Isaiah 58 (Uche is doing a paper on a part of Isaiah 58)

Isaiah 58:6-10
"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:

to loose the chains of injustice

and untie the cords of the yoke,

to set the oppressed free

and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry

and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter-

when you see the naked, to clothe him,

and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Then you light will break forth like the dawn,

and your healing will quickly appear;

then your righteousness will go before you,

and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.

Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;

you will cry for help, and he will say: Here I am

"If you do away with the yoke of oppression,

with the pointing finger and malicious talk,

and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry

and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,

then your light will rise in the darkness,

and your night will become like the noonday.

And because every post should have some pictures...

The river surrounding the community is going down as dry season continues. When we first visited we had to ride a boat across the river, now we're able to drive across. I wonder if it'll dry up completely.