I travel regularly to the 4th world—a place where years of prayer keeps everyone expectantly looking for the day they join the ranks of the third world. In the midst of all the pain, turmoil, sickness, struggle and death are women. These are the heroes of the developing world. These are the ones who rise each day to the drudgery of survival, do the hard work of assuring that life goes on for family, neighbors and anyone without someone to care for or about them.
I wonder if Eve were to bite into an apple today, would the world even notice? Would her female act be considered important? I mean she was “only” a woman after all.
I am amazed and humbled by the faith and fortitude of these women. Could I survive as a women in our developing world today? Could you?
Last week, I listened and ached over the story of another young, sweet, kind, hard-working woman as she told me her story of daily survival. She had traveled to Sudan from her own country to find work. To find regular and daily survival. What she found was love, a husband, two children and hard labor. Each day, she is required to work hard to care for her children while her husband is in a far off city. He returns home for only a few days each year—just long enough to produce another mouth to feed. But, her lot is much worse than that, she’s an outsider and therefore is expected to care for the extended family (all 25 of them), to wash their clothes at the river, to cook their food in the dark, both morning and night.
How did her life become this? How did women, the faithful daily engines of survival for so many, become so “unimportant?"
So I wonder, if Eve were to bite into an apple today, would anybody care? Would anybody notice? I mean she was just a woman after all.
Written by Steve. If Steve is not working at Starbucks or on an international flight, he usually can be found encouraging a woman to use her gifts to change our world… or fold laundry.
