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RSSSkilled in Doing Good
by The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
9/21/2007
Pentecost 16, Proper 19, Year C
Jeremiah 4:11-12,22-28 or Exodus 32:7-14
Psalm 14 or 51:1-11
I Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10
They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good. -- Jeremiah 4:22
So much money and energy goes into so many questionable enterprises in this world. Sometimes it seems that there is not a law or a moral obligation that cannot be skirted, provided enough money is thrown at it -- and there seems never to be a shortage of money for that.
We are disheartened by the zest with which evil is waged, but there are people waging good, too, with equal vigor. Dr. Stephen Dzisi, a physician with long experience and special expertise in infant and child mortality in Africa, has just been named head of Nets For Life, the partnership program joining Episcopal Relief and Development and a number of corporate and philanthropic foundations whose mission is to dramatically reduce the number of infant and child deaths from malaria, through the distribution of insecticide-treated mosquito nets and training of local community members in helping parents learn to use them.
Nets for Life is now completing its second year of operation. It has distributed 328,708 nets to families in 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, protecting almost 700,000 people from contracting the disease that kills 3,000 children every day worldwide. 3,400 people have been trained as community volunteers in this effort.
Stephen Dzisi is a doctor, highly educated and well-traveled. Some of the community volunteers in Nets for Life have had little or no schooling. They work together, teaching skills that make the difference between life and death for vulnerable children and the parents who love them.
Human beings are endowed with the gift of reason and the capacity to learn. How we use our gifts is up to us. We can squander them on unimportant trifles. We can deploy them in the service of genuine evil. Or we can use our gifts as the people in Nets for Life do: to learn and teach a safer, better way of living to protect the innocent and make the world a safer, better place.
