National Prayer Breakfast Speech
February 8, 2008
by Ward Brehm

Thank you, Senator Enzi.  I am deeply humbled by your introduction and proud to be able to call you my friend.  Most of you were probably surprised when you picked up the program and saw a speaker you’ve never heard of before. Me too!  One month ago, I sent in my registration… and was just hoping for a good seat!

My thanks also to the members of the Senate group for this opportunity.  A good friend emailed me last night and said that if God was going to speak through me I didn’t need to be nervous.  God is the one who should be nervous!  My wife read to me from Scripture last night that Jesus said when two or more gather in His name he will be there.  That’s good enough for me!

My work has given me the high privilege of serving you, Mr. President, the American people, and above all, the poor in Africa.  The best way to help the poor is to help them not be poor anymore.  The only way I know how to do that is through job creation, and the very best form of sustainable development is a steady paycheck.  It’s been said that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.  But that’s not the full story.  If you want to eat for a lifetime, you need to own the pond.

So, a bit of background… despite that eloquent introduction, I am a recovering Type-A controlling businessman.  I’ve been described even by people who like me as someone who is often wrong but seldom in doubt.  I was a bit of a problem child growing up.  In fact, my pastor since childhood, Arthur Rouner, recently referred to me as A Ministerial long shot!  They say that if God wants to get your attention he will toss a pebble into your life.  If that doesn’t work He’ll throw a rock.  As a last resort He’ll heave a brick!  Africa was my brick.

In 1994, Africa was not on my personal radar screen.  In fact, the only thing on that radar screen was ME!  In the Los Angeles Airport I bought a copy of Stephen Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  I didn’t buy it to learn anything, but just wanted to make sure he got them all right!  I was intrigued by Covey’s notion of paradigms: identical sets of facts can mean something totally different because of your world view.

Somalia was in the news at the time, and countless numbers of Africans were dying from starvation.  I felt no real connection to this humanitarian crisis.  My radar screen was full.  Paradigms usually change because of shock or trauma, but I wondered if it might be possible for someone to change their paradigm on purpose.  I supposed that if I were to see people starving, it would change that paradigm and perhaps much more.  The thought left me nearly as quickly as it came.  But God sent me a reminder.  One week later, I made one of my occasional stops at church.  My pastor, out of the blue, took me aside and said, “Ward, I’m going to Africa in two months, and I would like you to go with me.”  I told him I couldn’t believe the coincidence of his invitation given my recent reflections on Somalia.  Then I said…“No!”  He looked at me in a strange way, and he said, “Would you at least pray about it?”  I looked at him and said, “You’re the pastor; YOU pray about it.  I will THINK about it but suspect my answer will still be no.”

He must have prayed hard, because two months later, I found myself in the Minneapolis airport with a ticket to Ethiopia in my hand.  I was surrounded (for lack of a better word) by church ladies.  And they were hugging me.  Then someone suggested we pray before we departed, so I found myself outside Gate 8A, holding hands with a group of strangers.  And as I stand here before the National Prayer Breakfast I can honestly say I uttered my first heartfelt and sincere prayer…  “Lord…Don’t let any of my clients see me!”

And then we flew 12,000 miles to Africa, and a million miles from my comfort zone.  I had the high privilege of having my heart broken.  I saw poverty on an obscene level.  Children with flies on their eyes and for the lack of a 50 cent medicine doomed to blindness, the emaciated faces of famine, families shattered by civil war.  And in Masaka, Uganda I held the hand of a 22-year-old Mother as she died of AIDS and then turned and looked directly into the eyes of four brand new orphans.  I was an eyewitness.  It put a face on the statistics.  I always believed that those statistics were true, but now they were real.  It got personal…. 

More recently, I took a long walk with a warrior turned pastor friend deep into an unknown wilderness along the northern Rift Valley that divides Northwest Kenya with Uganda.  He took me to where they had never seen a person with white skin.  When they first spotted me, they thought I was a ghost…a dead man walking.  For a while, I thought they’d be right.  I fasted for five days on this walk to experience real hunger, but had brought along protein bars in the case of (as Lodinyo put it) an “emergency.”  At the end of the walk, I collapsed in a borrowed sleeping hut.  When I awoke 13 hours later, I saw a little boy peeking through the door.  While he was initially terrified, curiosity eventually got the best of him, and I noticed he was concentrating more on my stash of power bars than he was on me.  He succeeded in snatching a bar, and immediately ran away.  “Kids are the same everywhere,” I thought, until I stepped outside the hut, and found a little boy kneeling over his two-year old sister with a terribly distended stomach, feeding her tiny pieces of protein.  I found out 3 months later that she had died… another paradigm shift.

Now after more than 30 trips to Africa, the question I have been asked more than any other by my African friends is “What do you pray for?”  Most of us among the affluent have too many things.  Too much food, multiple cars, great health care, retirement plans, insurance.  It’s only when things fall completely apart, and we’re totally out of control that we feel totally dependent, and thus closest to God.  Death, cancer, business failure, addiction, divorce, crises; these are the things that drop us to our knees.  All across the world, including America, things are continually falling apart for the truly poor…They are always out of control, constantly living in a crises mode, and thus dependent and faithful to God’s own commandment that we love Him with all our hearts.  God is often all the poor have.

The leaders that God anoints are their only hope.  And despite the often-horrific conditions they live in, the poor are thankful for their very existence.  Scripture asks, “Hasn’t God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and inherit the Kingdom?”  Yes, He has. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.  The question I’m asked the most by my American friends is, “Why cross an ocean to help people when you need only cross the street, to help your own?”  It’s a great question, and the answer is, of course, that we need to do both.

Solzhenitsyn said that disaster is defined by two things: magnitude and distance. So a small disaster close to home or a huge disaster faraway, results in what he describes as “bearable disasters of bearable proportions.”  We’ve become too good at “bearing.”  Our hearts should be broken by the things that break the heart of God.  Specifically in Africa, there are many faraway disasters of epic proportions. In 1994…In Rwanda, a country the size of Maryland, the political genocide claimed over 800,000 lives, 9,000 lives per day for 90 days.  That’s two World Trade Center disasters per day for 3 months.

Today…in Darfur, Sudan. 1.5 million homeless.  Thousands terrorized raped and killed.  AIDS is killing 4,400 people per day in Africa, and even more are dying from curable malaria.  Epic disasters of epic proportions, far from home for most of us.  We have hundreds right here in this room from all around the world our neighbors this morning… who experience these epic disasters close to home.

I do want to say this while I have the chance with the President sitting right here.  Very few people are aware that due to President Bush’s commitment and the resulting partnership with Congress there has been an absolutely historic four-fold increase in American assistance to fight poverty and AIDS in Africa.  In 2003 there were 50,000 Africans on anti viral medication and today there are over 1.5 million.  I have not met a SINGLE person who hasn’t agreed with this high calling.  Proverbs, the book of Wisdom says “speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves and defend the rights of the poor and destitute.”  You have been that voice and on behalf of the “least of these” in Africa as well as the collective American conscience, I want to say … “Thank you Mr. President.”

Do you remember when Jesus was talking to His disciples, and asked them when He was hungry, why they didn’t give Him any food, and when He was naked, why they didn’t give Him any clothes?  And the disciples said something like, “Lord, we never did any of those things to You.”  I always thought (like most folks) that Jesus replied “Whenever you did this to the least of these, you did this unto Me.”  Except He didn’t say that.  What He said was, “When ever you did this to one of the least of these, you did this on to Me.”  How often do we forget the word “one.”  It changes the meaning of what Jesus said completely.  In our quest to be helpful, we can rob the poor of their dignity.  In order to be of any help to the poor, we need to understand them, we need to know them, and we need to Love them.  They are not a group.  The poor is not a species.  They are identical to us in their hopes and dreams.  They love their families and long for a better life.  The only difference is that they are poor.  And people don’t suffer and die in groups.  It’s one at a time.  And each one of those deaths leaves an identical wake of agony to what you and I and our families would experience.

So what are we supposed to do with all of this? How does this fit with our own world, so different and so faraway?  Frankly, I’m not sure, but we do have some clues…Jesus said, “The poor will always be with you.”  What an odd thing to say……. especially coming from Him!  Jesus also said, “To whom much has been given, much will be expected.”  So maybe This is a test of sorts. If so, how are we doing?  I have heard stories similar to mine of peoples’ lives being changed: from orphanages in Russia to inner-city schools in Minneapolis, from the slums of Calcutta to remote medical clinics in the mountains of Afghanistan, from the streets of Washington, DC, to wretched prisons in East Asia.  Indeed, all across the world people are answering Jesus’ question, “Who is my neighbor?”  And these people are finding themselves changed, engaged, and discovering meaning and relevance by being involved in things much bigger than themselves.  I believe that, deep down, most people would love to have God change their lives.  Here’s the thing: if asked, He will, every time, guaranteed.  And while these changes may initially seem scary, they ultimately lay a foundation for a life lived on purpose rather than by default.

I will be forever indebted to Africa. Africa awakened me when I didn’t even know I was asleep.  I pray that everyone who seeks one will find a similar path.  I pray that each of you will find your own Africa…

A few years ago my good friend, Gary Haugen, asked me the most important question of all. 
For those four orphans I was with in Uganda who watched their mother die of AIDS and were suddenly completely on their own…  
For a twelve year old girl kidnapped and sold into slavery in rural India… 
For a single mom evicted and homeless on the streets of DC… 
For each one of them:  

WHAT IS GOD’S STRATEGY FOR LETTING THEM KNOW THAT HE IS GOOD?
The mother in Ethiopia sees her baby die of malnutrition.  Why would she think God is good?  and what is God’s strategy for allowing her to know that He loves her?
The answer is astounding.  The answer is…… US!
Even more astonishing…He has no plan B.
God bless you One and all.

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