The only thing that counts [works] is faith expressing itself through love. – Galatians 5:6

If anyone needs to be convinced of how complicated it is to tackle global poverty, I recommend “Poor Economics” by Abhijit Banerjee. By halfway through, every great theory you’ve had or heard of has been debunked as unworkable for a plethora of reasons. The magnitude of differences between cultures is hard to imagine, and the roadblocks are hard to exaggerate.

Yet sometimes we make things complicated because we depersonalize them. Real life situations aren’t usually that tricky, if you have someone operating with faith and love.

In 1998, Hurricane Mitch ripped through Nicaragua. 300 families who’d lost their homes put up temporary shelters on a nearby piece of land. When I visited them over 20 years after the catastrophe, they were still living without basic essentials like clean drinking water. Everyone was sick, every day. Most were unemployed. Babies were malnourished. You get the picture. Imagine how much energy it would take just to formulate a plan to help them.

Fortunately, we’d partnered with a local pastor, Osvaldo. At first it seemed like his fixation on programs to feed children were well meaning, but not a sustainable solution. Then we heard his reasoning. Their fathers are dead or in jail. The oldest brother has to join a gang to provide for the family, and awaits the same fate. If we could feed the children for 10 years, we could break the cycle. It was one arm of his comprehensive 5-part strategy for village transformation.

Working with Osvaldo, within a week we provided clean drinking water for the whole village, for $300. The villagers dug 4-foot deep trenches, Osvaldo got the city to connect them to a water main, and we paid for the pipes. I visited a year later and everyone was drinking from the taps. No one was sick from contaminated water.

We worked with Osvaldo for several years and he was far from perfect. But we refused to go around him. We weren’t implementing our ideas. We weren’t positioning ourselves as the ones to convene the community leaders and discern a strategy together. We supported Osvaldo’s vision and trusted God to work through him in the sphere that God had given him.

Because even though we had better technology, more money, etc., Osvaldo was the one who had the faith and love. It’s the same for the sphere God has given you. What they need is your faith and love.