Give Me Your Eyes -- A Compassion International Post

I am one of those pesky adults that likes to ask children questions. It can be the kids at church or a niece or nephew or one of the ones that come into the bookstore.

• What did you do at school today?
• What is your favorite color?
• What is your favorite book?
• Do you like puppies?

Not so often, but sometimes I ask (especially if there is a chocolate milk mustache), "What did you have for dinner?"

I've recently fallen in love with Brandon Heath's song "Give Me Your Eyes." Here is the chorus:

Give me your eyes for just one second
Give me your eyes so I can see
Everything that I keep missing
Give me your love for humanity
Give me your arms for the brokenhearted
Ones that are far beyond my reach
Give me your heart for the ones forgotten
Give me your yes so I can see

As I've listened to that song today, I've found myself imagining asking, "What did you eat today?" to children around the world. God has had me imagining wide eyes and distended tummies as His children look, crestfallen at the ground and shrug thin shoulders.

Compassion has a lot of information on children in poverty. Here are some of the sobering statistics:

• Over 600 million children in developing countries live on less than one US dollar a day.
• 9 million children under the age of 5 die every year with malnutrition the cause of one third of these deaths.
• 1 in 5 children does not have access to safe water

My sponsored children are involved in Compassion International (obviously) so they had at least one meal today. But so many others didn't. (And one meal? Is that enough?) As I write I have a full stomach. Here is what I ate today:

• Breakfast: 2 Waffles, OJ
• Snack: Juice, peanuts
• Lunch: Peanut Butter Sandwich and fresh fruit
• Dinner: 2 KFC Snackers and a pop
• Safe water available at all times

By US standards, it wasn't a huge amount of food. By developing nations standards, by imagining big eyed children with rumbling tummies and parents that ache to feed them, it seems almost obscene.

Given the delay in posts being delivered, by the time you read this, it will be tomorrow. It's just one day, but for tomorrow I will fast and pray for all those children and pray that God shows me better how to reach the ones that He sees.

"Give me your eyes" could be a dangerous prayer. I wonder what would happen if I prayed that every day.