Dear readers, I scribbled the word virtue and asked myself where does it stand when your family lives perpetually hungry. Where food, water and resources are scarce to the point of non-existence. All of this simultaneously as my women’s church group shared relfections of virtue and how we lived accordingy to the words written in Proverbs 31.
There we were, sharing candy and praising ourselves, when in Venezuela our sisters have to embrace prostitution in the neighboring Trinidad & Tobago because their children, parents, or husband are literally starving to death. Can you imagine just for a bare second what it would feel to go to bed without eating all day, so your children can have the rationalized portion of a meal? Thinking, while your body cries in dispair, what will they eat tomorrow?
Shivering with pain and exhaustion, fighting against a corrupted system that is broken beyond repair. Discouraged and desperate she accepts to be smuggled to nearby Trinidad where a bar owner awaits for the woman he has already paid 100.00 for. A woman who will do whatever it is she needs to do to put food in her children’s stomach. A woman who will leave her husband’s loving hands to be violated over and over again by an endless line of anoymous men. That’s what virtue looks like in the midst of hunger.
Is this the woman who Proverbs talks about?
I really don’t know.
What I do know is how ridiculous I feel about sharing my so called virtue over a piece of candy that is savored by some and rejected by others. Practicing the love of God in a banal way, and feeling shallow and ashamed in the face of no action.
Virtue my dear friends is relative upon the eyes of the observer.
Instead of focusing on our I’s, my’s and all ego centered stories, let us humbly pray in gratitude for the food we have in our pantries and ask God to guide us on to how we can help our brothers and sisters in Venezuela to survive the raft of man’s greatest foe, power gone very wrong.
See you around the corner, hasta pronto.
