Tag: Iraq

Iraq & Syria Relief Fund | One Day’s Wages

Photo by James Gordon


I’ve given to One Day’s Wages before and they’re the real deal. It’s the same charity to which I gave half my salary a few years ago. Please donate anything you can for the oppressed people of Syria and Iraq.

We at ODW are overwhelmed with sadness by the suffering in Syria and Iraq and the surrounding region. Tragically over 230,000 people have died since the start of the Syrian crisis, and over 14 million people are in need of emergency humanitarian aid. We know it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the scale and severity of this, but we also know that people are capable of making an amazing impact in the face of human suffering.

Join us as we stand with the people of Iraq and Syria to provide aid and relief through this crisis and into the rebuilding.


Why Don’t We Care More About Persecuted Christians?

Image from CNN, showing Syrian Kurds behind border fences to cross into Suruc.

prism0prone asked a question:

Why isn’t anything being done about ISIS? We’re all just living our privileged little lives. As the days pass I feel more depressed & farther away from God. I cry to Him about it but I hear nothing & I’m afraid. And every time I see a cheerful Christian post about God keeping us safe, I feel bitterness and anger and I can feel my emotions slowly shutting down and I don’t want that but it just hurts. So. Much.

My friend, honestly, your question very much stirred me and disturbed me and convicted me.  It broke my heart.

Because I think I’m part of the problem.  I post prayer requests about ISIS or some other atrocity or disaster or tragedy, and I question myself.  Am I doing this to show I care?  Do I really care?  Can I do more?  If there are 27 million slaves in the world and 26,000 children who die everyday of preventable causes: how could I even be on this blog?  How could I even think about anything else?

It’s so discouraging.  To be truthful, it keeps me up at night.  I’m not saying that to boast.  The one time I really did anything about it a few years ago, I gave away half my salary to fight human trafficking, and even then, I felt guilty that I wasn’t doing enough.  I don’t say that to boast, either.  We live in a painfully broken world where even a single glance at it could eat us alive.

There’s another layer to this guilt, too.  Sometimes I think I use poor people as a prop for my own “savior-narrative.”  Or I become a pseudo-Social Justice Warrior about issues I’ve hardly researched, or I try to be a Google-Expert about statistics that I haven’t double-checked.  I donate money to various charities every month, but maybe even this is because I look around my apartment and I see wealth, and it disgusts me, and I donate out of a self-loathing heart.  I want to boycott a billion different things, or say to everyone, “Your problems are dumb, because kids in Somalia are dying and there’s still genocide in Iraq and 80% of the world lives on less than a dollar per day.”

The more news I read, the more it kills me inside.  The more I see mocked up selfies, and cute Christianese slogans on Instagram, or these theological debates that only other theologians care about: the more I get angry, frustrated, hurt.  How can we break free from this cycle?

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