Acts 8.26-40.
Quickly the doors open.
God’s love reaches far and wide.
An angel sends Philip to a desert road, to meet a carriage, a man on his way back home …
The power of one … one person with a purpose … with a heart … with a vision … a willingness to go to a desert road, get into someone else’s carriage, spend some time with them.
How many of you have ever heard of John Wood?
I never heard of him either, until earlier this week.
He’s a library man.
12,000 libraries and 1,500 schools, all around the world.
[the following material comes largely from a New York Times article - see below; I’ve edited it to conform to preaching].
It began in 1998 when Wood, a Microsoft marketing director, came upon a remote school in Nepal serving 450 children. Only one problem: It had just a few books.
Wood offered to help and eventually delivered a mountain of books by a caravan of donkeys.
The local children were happy, and Wood said he felt such exhilaration that he quit Microsoft, left his live-in girlfriend (who pretty much thought he had gone insane), and founded Room to Read in 2000.
He faced one challenge after another, not only in opening libraries, but in filling them.
There are no children’s books in many languages, so Wood became a self-publisher, with now more than 591 titles in languages including Khmer, Nepalese, Zulu, Lao, Xhosa, Chhattisgarhi, Tharu, Tsonga, Garhwali and Bundeli.
Room to Read also supports 13,500 impoverished girls who might otherwise drop out of school.
In a remote corner of the Mekong Delta, reachable only by boat, one of these girls, a 10th grader name Duyen … her family, displaced by flooding, lives in a shabby tent on a dike.
When Duyen was in seventh grade, she dropped out of school to help her family. “I thought education was not so necessary for girls,” she said.
Room to Read’s outreach workers trekked to her home and convinced the family to send her back to school. Room to Read paid her school fees, bought her school uniforms and offered to put her up in a dormitory so that she wouldn’t have to commute to school, two hours each way, by boat and bicycle.
Duyen is back in school, a star in her class — and aiming for the moon.
“I would like to go to university,” she says.
The cost per girl is $250 annually.
To give some perspective, Kim Kardashian’s wedding is said to have cost $10 million; $10 million could have supported 40,000 girls in Room to Read.
Education is a powerful tool to transform the world … the powerful nations of the world have yet to learn this lesson - the big powers of the world continue to believe that the world can be made better with missiles, soldiers, conniving treaties and billions spent on planes and warships.
Schooling is cheap and revolutionary … the more we spend on schools today, the less we’ll have to spend on missiles tomorrow.
Wood is only 47 years old - tireless, enthusiastic, emotional … when he talks about Room and to Read and the lives of girls transformed, he tears up.
“If you can change a girl’s life forever, and the cost is so low, then why are there so many girls still out of school?” he asks.
Room to Read now has fund-raising chapters in 53 cities around the world.
Wood tells supporters they aren’t donating to charity but making an investment: “Where can you get more bang for the buck than starting a library for $5,000?”
“There are 793 million illiterate people - the solution is so inexpensive ….
No guarantee every child will take advantage of the opportunity, but if it isn’t provided, there will be no opportunity at all, and poverty will continue.
Wood would like to have a 100,000 libraries, in 20 years, reaching 50 million kids.
Big plans … big ideas … and it all started with one man’s decision
[The New York Times: “His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives,” by Nicholas D. Kristoff, November 5, 2011].
Whatever we might learn from the story of Philip, this much we know for sure: God works through people, just like Philip, just like you and me, just like John Wood.
An angel told Philip: Go to the desert road between Jerusalem and Gaza …
Philip might have asked a millions questions:
Why?
How come?
What am I supposed to do?
How much will it cost?
How long will it take?
Isn’t there anyone else?
No questions … just obedience … call it faith … faith isn’t something we believe … faith is what we do with our hands and our feet … faith is life, action, decision, work …
Philip went to the desert road.
And when a carriage came near, the Spirit told Philip, Approach this carriage and stay with it.
We know the rest of the story.
Dear friends, never underestimate your power to change the world … God works through people … great things happen when love is the power, when compassion is the goal, when someone says, I’ll do it!
Who knows?
Maybe there’s a John Wood sitting in the congregation right now … an idea … a project … a dream … it’ll unfold, and the world will be changed.
Maybe there’s a Philip here … one day, an angel will tell you where to go … because someone needs to hear your voice and guidance.
Who knows?
Never ever underestimate your place in the kingdom of God.
Never underestimate the doors you can open!
Amen and Amen!
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