The following is written by Mo Avignon, a student from our Echo ministry.
A few times during the year, Echo gets together to do an event called Reveal which is a time where we look at things in our world and see what God can “reveal” to us. This fall we had Reveal: Power. During this time, we reflected over what it really means to have power and how power in God’s Kingdom looks different than power in the world. Through this I learned that it’s not just corporation owners or the celebrities or the most popular people at school who have power. We all have power, in different forms and ways, we all have control over something.
On the first day of Reveal, we went through stations that taught us about God’s Kingdom in different ways. One of the stations included cutting out pictures that showed examples of kingdoms of the world and then we thought of examples to compare them with God’s Kingdom.
Another station included parables that taught us what the Kingdom of God is like. This activity stood out to me because it was a chance to look into what the Bible says about poverty and what my roles are in the big picture.
To simulate the inequality of wealth in the world, we were separated into three different groups for lunch, to symbolize the people in the world: those who have more than enough, those who have enough, and those who have barely enough to get by. I was part of the poorest group. The group that doesn’t get the opportunity to go to school, usually works really hard, doesn’t see the results and is constantly wondering when their next meal will be, and will it be enough. As if putting us in groups wasn’t enough, we were all given different amounts of food. I think we all know where this is going. I was in the group that was given the least amount of food.
It was interesting to see the protests from my group, even though it was expected. The heckling and yelling that we did at the “richer” groups made me really think of the times that the poor and less fortunate often are ignored. This part of the day stood out most to me, particularly to see that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone, but that it isn’t distributed equally. I already knew some of this, but it was interesting to see the percentages in each group and see the visual representation.
For the second half of the day, we all went to different sites to see how power is used in different ways. My group went to Sharing Korner, which is a food shelf, and we all got to see how they used their power to help people and serve them. While at Sharing Korner, we learned about how their organization worked and helped them with a few things by moving items to their new location across the street.
Through this Reveal, we learned a lot about poverty. There are many people that live somewhere between poor and rich. Those people may not have a lot of “power” over the rich, but definitely have “power” over the poor. So where do each of us fall in that spectrum? Why are some people rich and others poor? Chance? Yes, that’s a big chunk of it, but we also have learned this: there are more than enough of the earth’s resources to go around for everyone on this planet. It seems like we just need to work together better than we do right now.
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