Jonathan Stoner is a friend of ours. We first met because he was serving in Hawaii at the University of the Nations by being a staffer in a school of digital filmmaking. He produced a short film that Keaton and Regan were in. After that time he served as a staff member for a Compassion DTS that traveled to Uganda to care for children dying and suffering from the AIDS epidemic in that country. We helped send him there and I wanted to paste here one portion from his newsletter we just received. He recently returned from Uganda to his home in Michigan. Enjoy!
Being home in Michigan I am so grateful for the abundance of options, flavors, colors, styles,
and labor saving mechanical devices available to me but for the life of me I can’t stop examining
the gross inequalities of my pampered life in the West when measured against the standard of
living for the majority of my friends in Africa.I heard something the other day that has not stopped troubling me—the amount of money
Americans spend every year on ice cream is enough to provide food, water, and health care for
the entire world. I now have a responsibility to do something about what I have seen and heard
and I can’t ease back into living to entertain myself when there is a whole world of people
outside our door screaming for a Savior. It would be a tragedy if this mission trip was relegated
to a photo album that I bring out once a year to impress the guests with tales about the African
adventure that I had when I was a young man.
May we all learn something from the wisdom of this 25 year old.