”Never Again! is not a slogan. It’s a witness to the world that senseless violence will not stand.“
TAKE ACTION
Action Steps
A few well worn stepping stones lie along the path to enduring commitment to a worthwhile cause. Together they lead to effective, sustainable action. At one time or another, everybody who gets involved—really involved—steps on them. They’re a necessary part of the personal spiritual process of making commitments and keeping them. The steps? Here’s a list:
- Awareness: learning about an issue (Darfur, in our case), investigating it, asking tough questions, consulting the Scriptures, and letting our awareness grow until it rises to the point of moral conviction that we bear personal responsibility to do something.
- Conversion: the personal struggle to confront fear, denial, futility, selfishness—whatever distances us from the suffering—a struggle confronted through confession and repentance until moral conviction rises to the level of commitment.
- Engagement: realizing that, just as faith without works is dead, our commitments are less than real if we don’t also struggle to find a way to serve; our commitment must rise to the level of concrete action.
- Empowerment: the surprise we discover (over and over!) that when we set out in faith to care for the downtrodden we find the courage to act growing within us, and the passion to continue becomes infectious.
- Mobilization: discovering that as our conviction, commitment, and courage grow it becomes easier (natural, even) to recruit others to get involved in the action and to begin organizing the groups and networks it takes to mount a public campaign.
- Perseverance: the hope, personal character, love, and connection with others that grow within us as we act, and that sustain us through trials and long stretches of hard work, until our goal is reached—in our case, persevering until peace is reached in Darfur and beyond.
Each of us may step on these stones in different orders, different ways. For some, conversion to a cause may come swiftly in a moment. For others, it arrives after a long process of inner struggle. For the rest of us, it just happens along the way as we jump in and look for places to help.