“Depending on how you count the statistics, the United States is basically 5 to maybe 6% of the entire world’s population, and yet, we live and act often times like we’re 99% of the world’s population.”

Mission leader, speaker and teacher Paul Borthwick encourages us to develop a global curiosity to better understand the world. He defines global curiosity as,

“The ability to ask questions about the world, ‘What is that like? What does it mean?’”

“We hear things on the news like Sunnis vs. Shiites vs. Wahabis, yet most people have no idea what we’re talking about, only that it’s something to do with Islam. Learning about the fuel crisis that’s still striking the poor people of Nepal, who are still recovering from two devastating earthquakes, that kind of stuff just bypasses us.”

There is plenty of suffering around the world that we might not be aware of. More damaging, there is suffering that we are apathetic too.

“Apathy does not mean that we don’t care, the word literally means that we don’t feel.

“There’s an earthquake in Haiti; the first day we’re overwhelmed, the second day we want to send the gifts, two weeks later it’s like, ‘What earthquake?’  We’ve become used to it and that’s one of the most difficult parts of living in an oversaturated world with information. Sometimes we won’t know anything about what’s going on with the earthquake in Haiti, but we know all the names of the Kardashian children and it’s just embarrassing.

“I’m not pointing any fingers at anybody other than myself. Am I more concerned about how the New England Patriots are doing then how the Christians are doing in the refugee camps of Syria?”

“That’s where it goes comes back to making a choice. That’s not to say I don’t watch football or anything like that, it’s just to say I’m going to choose what the priority concerns of my life are.”

Paul shares about his college experience going to an Urbana Student Missions Conference with a few fellow students. They were challenged to learn more about the world.

“We decided that we would have this little fellowship group and the goal was to learn something about everywhere and everything about somewhere.”

We all have the opportunity to learn more about the world and see it through God’s eyes. 

“For each one of us, we can stay alert to the world by once in a while at least listening to an international news broadcast.

“The BBC goes into greater detail of some of these stories and learning about other parts of the world, or reading news letters from mission agencies or missionaries, following a specific issue; maybe it’s the persecution of the church in Iran.”

Highlight: Learning about the world

Seeing the world through God’s eyes