How do you decide if someone is bad or good? It’s not always easy to keep a list of good deeds versus bad. This is the question some of my family and I discussed after seeing the new movie Slumdog Millionaire. Salim, the older brother of Jamal, is a study of human response to abject poverty.
Slumdog Millionaire not only confronts us with abject poverty and the toll it takes on human behavior, but also with the reality of our wealth against the needs of the world. The difficulties most of us are facing in this struggling economy are seen in a different light after we’ve followed children running through the slums of Mumbai, watched women washing in the river, and experienced the toilets of the poor.
From the time I read The City of Joy, a story that takes place in the slums of Calcutta, Mumbai, written by Dominique Lapierre, and then saw the movie, I knew I had to go to India, and so I went. I traveled across this nation of over a billion people for only a few days, but the poverty I saw released a flood of tears that I could not stop. Only when I went with Christ followers who live and serve in the slums of Delhi did I trust that hope is reaching out in some of the most grievous places in the world.
Books can paint a picture that carries us to faraway places; and as believers, God uses words to move us toward His plan for our lives. If the message of Q & A, the book on which Slumdog Millionaire is based, had not been “it is written,” but rather, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” how different the lives of Salim and Jamal could have been. What are you writing today that may lead someone to discover the only final word in life is the Word. How will you take that person to the place where God would have him or her go, to accomplish what God has planned for them to do? In Christ, “it is written,” indeed.
Karma, a little three-year-old girl, was quietly eating her small slice of dessert pizza at CiCi’s Pizza restaurant while I visited with one of her six brothers and sisters. It didn’t take her long to remove the lid from the Parmesan cheese jar and pour a large pile of the cheese on top of her dessert pizza. By the time I saw what she was doing, she was eating it with all the gusto her tiny body could employ!
There was a time that I would have been at least a little concerned, but my only response was to laugh with pleasure. She didn’t need my guidance to know what she liked to eat, and I had no intention of interfering.
Karma was a heavenly reminder that I don’t have to control life. I can relax and take pleasure in the chaos of living and working. God is in control. This is what I intend to take with me into the world of publishing this next week. Even though the forecasts for 2009 are dire, I want to see what God will do and laugh with pleasure at His handiwork.
