China Town with a Taste of Hunger

I saw something on Tumblr last week.  It was on a little, "Did you know?" page, and was something that they had posted that day.  It said that there are more people in the world today that are obese than are hungry.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.  

The first thing that passed my mind when I read this was that it was ill informed.  While there are indeed many people who are obese, some of those same people also struggle with hunger.  They struggle with feeding themselves and their families.   Often the food that leads to obesity is the food that is given to those in hunger, or is the food that they could afford.

What bothered me the most though were the comments that people wrote below.  "Wow, I never would have guessed!"  "We're ending hunger!"

I think we do this a lot with a variety of issues.  We try to find one sugar coated statement and we focus our whole mindset, social and political views, and even our own theologies off of it.  We fail to see the big picture because we're convinced that if someone is obese or overweight, that they can't be hungry.  As if hunger is only exclusive to the skinny, the ones with money, or the ones who can afford to be picky about what they put in their own bodies.  And we all should know that this doesn't just apply to hunger, but to a wide variety of issues.

This week I am in this nation's Capitol learning about hunger and what is being done to address it, as individuals, as a nation, as fellow human beings, and as the church.  Here I hope to learn more and widen my own horizons.  I hope to learn as a fellow person, but also as a Christian.  Jesus calls his followers to feed his sheep in the end of John.  It's important to learn about the issue and the people it affects if we should think of addressing it.