I’ve just walked another group of Canadians through slums in Zambia. This morning we met 3 women, all single mothers without any formal income, who have been feeding 25 orphaned kids who live in various conditions in their community and teaching them in the back yard of a shack rented by one of the women. None of ladies owns a home, nor owns much of anything.

As we listen to their story, and watch them interact with such vulnerable children, we wonder how and why they do this.

I know one thing: they don’t do it because they have a few extra bucks lying around, or because they have nothing better to do, or because they have so much more than they need and think it is probably the right thing to share from their excess.  

They do it because they believe passionately that those children who watched their parents fall ill and painfully die deserve love and care as much as their own children. And they have committed to living their lives with radical generosity built into their very fibre. That’s compassion. And the beauty of it is (trust me) enough to make you weep.

All of us are inspired by such selfless love. And today, after leaving these women, we sat around a table, drank coke and admired and praised them.

But after many such trips and many such conversations over the past few years, I am left asking myself the question: if we think what they do is so great, why don’t we do it ourselves? We say such people “inspire” us. But inspire us to do what exactly?

Despite our genuine tears and sincere admiration at such selfless love, some barrier keeps us separate from such a way of living. But what is it?

Do we think it’s easier for them to give so much than it would be for us to do it? Do we think we have a greater need for our things than these ladies do? Do we think our lives bear circumstances that make such sacrifice impossible, unrealistic? If we do, I promise you these ladies have more and better reasons. Thinking otherwise is just a convenient illusion.

Maybe the barrier really is just an illusion: the illusion that I am my number one priority. Over the course of my life, I have learned to live with both eyes firmly fixed on myself: my needs, my safety, my comfort. To do anything else, to live any other way just seems wrong and unhealthy. To deprive myself in order to advance someone else just isn’t natural. I think we all think this way.

Surely, we presume, it’s not realistic for me to skip a meal once in a while and instead give that food away; surely it’s not wise to, once in a while, pick out some of my nicest clothes (rather than the oldest, ugliest ones) and give them away; surely it’s just irresponsible planning to spend some of my retirement nest on feeding or educating a child (or 25 children) whose stomach always has hunger pains or has zero chance of even attending elementary school. That’s just not the way the world works. People don’t live like that.

But, in fact, it’s not true. People do live this way. I’ve seen it. And in spite of the sacrifices they make, they thrive and most of them would never choose to live any other way.

This is hard to understand because somehow we either don’t understand or don’t believe this simple truth: ‘It’s more blessed to give than to receive.” Or, as it might apply to most of us, ‘We’ll actually find more joy and life by radically sharing the stuff we have than by hording it and fawning over it.’

Though they challenge me to my very core, such women as the three we’ve met this morning are an incredible gift to me. I am blessed just to meet them, as well as the dozens of others I now know (and some I work with daily).

They demonstrate the real existence of a way of life that never seemed possible.