If you could give someone one item to learn about poverty in Africa, what would it be? What is the best way to teach about poverty and the global crises we face? What impacted you the most in learning about global poverty? I learned most about the Holocaust through visiting Mauthausen and reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night.” How do we teach about Africa’s poverty and AIDS crises? One way is to write novels …

A deep love for suffering children, especially those with AIDS and orphans …

A deep commitment and plea for those who can help to see what life in Africa is like …

And a realistic narrative of a photojournalist, whose own life crumbles, and a young African girl whose family is dying of AIDS and who herself suffers from starvation, atrocities … and these two come together, from such wildly contrasting worlds that one is driven to ponder the injustices of the world, into a message of realism and hope.

There is no reason why the typical suburban, computer-reading Christian can’t support a child or do something for the suffering orphans of this world.

These are the central themes of Tom Davis’ new novel, Scared: A Novel on the Edge of the World
, and I recommend the book but only if you want to be disturbed, challenged, and awakened to action.

Facts — like 26,500 children dying daily in the world from preventable diseases — strike us with objective force.

Stories, fictional accounts of utter, naked realities, strike us with emotive force.

Tom Davis, on the basis of the facts, uses the second approach to put in our minds and hearts the needs of Africa. I’ve posted about Tom’s ministry — HopeChest — before, and I’m glad to post yet again about this novel. I can’t think of Tom without thinking of the words of James … pure religion before God is to care for widows and orphans.