Some hard-hitting images from Save the Children UK this year. They were brought to my attention by Mike at Waving or Drowning.

He writes about blessing and cursing. Namely, how we talk about how “blessed” we are to live in the place where we do. The converse of this is that we somehow say that those who live in less wonderful places are somehow cursed. While I hadn’t thought about this dichotomy before, at least not the way Mike describes it, I have definitely experienced a bad taste in my mouth when we talk about how blessed we are and how much God has blessed us to live where we do…

Check out their campaign at The Lottery of Life. If I were born today, I would have a minuscule chance of being born as a Canadian: I can’t even see Canada on the wheel as a percentage of world population. Today, I’d have a much better chance of of being born in China, India, Nigeria, or Mexico. The interesting thing is, regardless of which country you end up in, there are issues that need to be dealt with in each place. While we might be “blessed” in Canada, there are still issues that need to be dealt with. We are amongst the worst in the developed world at dealing with our environmental issues. Our First Peoples are routinely marginalized. I walk downtown and see dozens of people asking for money, for food, offering work for food, desiring a place to live. The cold snap of a few weeks ago brought to the forefront our inability to house everyone in this city. Our foodbanks cannot keep up with demand and the foodbank at the university is the emptiest it has ever been. We have kids killing themselves because of bullying… or kids being killed by bullies.

No, we do not have land mines to be wary of when we go for a walk in the meadow or down by the ocean. No, we do not have armed rebel groups or rioting after electoral fraud (we just have two leader-less political parties and plenty of in-fighting). But we are not all there and there is a lot of work to be done. Are we blessed? Yes… but not to the exclusion of everyone else.