Life is never easy in the life of the refuge. Often it is not a question of simply shelter, but it is a question of every day that the Sudanese refuge of food and the ability of finding a way to cook it. Some two million people have been uprooted in the African nation of Sudan, where a severe civil war has created great tumult.
As with all wars, the combatants are not the only ones that are affected, it is the women, the elderly and the children that bear great hardship in the fighting. When the refuges began arriving at the camps in which they thought that great safety would be, other problems began to assert themselves.
It would be a problem of food, and though the international community has come through in a myriad of ways, there are very basic assumptions that we make that are often wrong. If you have food, and have fire, yet have no way of fueling this then it is at best a hardship, and at its worst, torture.
Christina Galistsky discovered this problem of inefficient cooking of the food, burning so much fuel that the natural resources were being depleted alarmingly. She decided to develop a stove that cooked efficiently and was cheap to produce. She achieved that feat with amazing results.
Those women who cook in Darfur faced great risk when collecting fuel, as they were preyed on by Arab militias. It makes gathering the fuel to cook the food as dangerous as not eating. Both kill.
Hidden in the problem is one that scripture addresses. Fire is not the problem. It is present, and yet the problem of fire is that it needs fuel to burn. It doesn’t matter if the fire has been banked against the night and everyone is in bed, getting needed rest or the bonfire is roaring. Fuel is necessary for both.
While this is so basic that we would tend to dismiss it as overly simplistic, remember that when fuel is available, these things don’t occur to us. Often the essence of problems are cured, not at the top, but down in the basic issues of them. Think that gathering fuel is easy? Not in battle, it isn’t. Think that fuel lies all around in the middle of the safety of camp? It doesn’t.
Paul would forcefully tell us in Romans 12:1-2, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”
It was a wood burning stove that would warm our house as a kid. Although young, my dad, my brother and I would collect wood for the fire during the winters. It involved chainsaws, hauling and splitting the fuel by hand. Quite frankly it was hard work. I did not do the majority of the work due to my age, but I was expected to help.
Fire wasn’t the problem. Dad had a box of matches. What was hard was the fuel.
What’s hard now is what was hard then. Fuel doesn’t come with a cheap price tag. It doesn’t come free. It doesn’t cost a little or a lot. It cost all.
When I present myself as a living sacrifice, I am placing myself as a fuel for a very different flame, one that isn’t interested in wood, but in a life that is well spent on an altar. I am a different fuel, for a different fire. Fire is not the problem, but sometimes this fuel is. If I want to be warm this fuel has to be willing to be offered. Am I able? Yes. Am I willing? Are you willing? That is the question that resounds.
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