NeueMinistry.com is a brand ‘neue’ ministry of Relevant magazine. I’m privileged to be part of a group writing articles for their launch. Specifically, I will be focusing on articles they are doing in partnership with The ONE Campaign. Here’s the very first one entiled, Crumbs From Your Table. Please check it out, leave a comment, rate the article, and link back to it on your blog. Here’s the first part of it. Click here to go to the site and read the entire article.

“And you speak of signs and wonders
But I need something other
I would believe if I was able
I’m waiting on the crumbs from your table

—“Crumbs from Your Table,” U2

U2 was among my favorite bands long before Bono became a household name and America’s prophet-in-chief. I was listening to “October” and “Boy” long before “The Joshua Tree” took the nation by storm. Their song “Crumbs From Your Table” from the 2004 release, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb , rings in my ears every time I visit the shantytowns of Swaziland, or the orphanages in Russia, or the streets of Ukraine, where gaunt children haunt the streets alone, in search of a scrap of food. The words echo in every story of a widow who has lived on grass and sticks for more than a month. Those lyrics pierce my heart when I think of the moldy cabbage offered to a young child in exchange for her innocence.

Those words rang in my mind last night after dinner. My wife and I sat down with our five children to a spread of delicacies. I was in a cooking mood, one of my favorite pastimes to relieve stress and enjoy a little of the good life. Our large table was covered by a variety of cheeses I picked up from our local organic grocery store, a mountain of guacamole and chips—and those were just starters. We moved onto baked potatoes as big as my hand and piled with all the trimmings, complemented with barbecued chicken, steak and bratwurst. Dessert wasn’t bad, either.

What struck me was how much food was wasted. We stored some of the leftovers, but I also scraped half-eaten potatoes, mounds of vegetables and scraps of meat and chicken into the trash. As I did, I wondered how many of the world’s poor could survive off of the crumbs left on my table.” Rest of the article here.