Recently I had the opportunity to visit a Third World country, where the people are afraid to go to sleep tonight for fear of what they may wake up to.

If they do wake up to a great, smoggy day, they set out to forage for food in hopes of finding enough to feed their children breakfast or lunch, and sometimes even dinner.

The children are ill with things that we often see in this country as physicians, and that are usually treated with antibiotics or other means. But they don’t have access to what we do. That often costs them their lives.

Some of the families that enter our clinics are refugees from other lands fleeing for their lives having taken nothing with him but the shirts on their backs, happy to have some of their children with them, although many were left behind in the frenzy and chaos.

We don’t see this here in this nation — not yet anyway. If God is merciful we won’t know what it means to have no hope other than in Him.

Even after all these years people ask me why I go. They don’t really understand my answer when I say I have no choice.

Some of you know where I go when I go, but for security reasons I usually can’t say. Even this blog is scanned on almost a daily basis by IP addresses located in lands with sworn hostilities to this nation. I can’t risk saying what I must not say.

All I know is that if God is not reflected in my life, my writing, my marriage, and my passions, then what on earth am I doing here?