I know I’ve written about this topic a few times before, but it’s something that I’m wrestling with at the moment.

Here’s the thing. On the one hand, there are huge amounts of people that die every day from poverty. The number is around 25,000 people or so, every day. And they die from preventable things like diseases, lack of food and water, and so on.

Now by Australian standards I’m not rich. My income is below the national average, and my house is at the cheapest end of the scale. But even so, I have enough money locked up in my lifestyle (in my home equity and my possesions) to save tens of thousands of people. If I unlocked some of that money, there is no denying that I have the ability to save so many people. I might be below average by Australian standards, but by world standards I’m in the top 1% of richest people (check where you are - visit www.globalrichlist.com and enter your annual income).

But on the other hand, God placed me in Australia. I was born here, this is my home, and the fact of life is that it’s expensive to live in Australia. The cost of living is high, and it takes a lot of money to live in an average home, put my kids through school, and live life. So I shouldn’t feel guilty about the cost of living a normal life in my home country.

But there’s a tension there. No matter how I look at it, every day that I continue to live this comfortable life, I am choosing to let people die. People that I can help. No matter how much I try to explain it away, if those people were standing in front of me today, my answer to them would effectively be: “I wish you well. But I’m choosing to have a nice dishwasher and surround sound entertainment system, rather than help you”. Surely I can do better than that?

So I’m wrestling with where the right position is for me. At the moment, rightly or wrongly, I feel like I have time to make the decision, because I currently still have kids living at home, and my role at the moment is to provide for them. But they are teenagers now, and in a few years when they’ve left home, all bets are off. I have no idea what I’ll end up doing then, but it will be interesting. And in the meantime, I’ll continue to wrestle with what’s the right thing to do.