Mohammed Yunus - A "Worm's Eye View"

I had the opportunity to attend a lecture given by Mohammed Yunnus at the Keenan Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill this morning. Yunnus is the founder of Grameen Bank and the father of the Microfinance movement. I read his book, Banker To The Poor, about two years ago and it had a tremendous impact on me.

There is a quote from him in that book that stands out as one of the most memorable quotes in any book I've ever read. He talked about how he was teaching economics at Dhaka University in Bangladesh and how he watched as poor people were dying in the streets right outside the university after making long journeys from villages to the city to find a better life for themselves. He realized the principles of economics were not working for those poor people and that something needed to be done.

So, he determined to learn to understand the life of the poor in order to help them.

"Instead of traditional book learning, I wanted to teach my university students how to understand the life of one single poor person. When you hold the world in your palm and inspect it only from a bird’s eye view, you tend to become arrogant—you do not realize that things get blurred when seen from an enormous distance. I opted instead for “the worm’s eye view.”

I think this is very similar to what Jesus did through his life on earth. In order to understand what life was like for humanity, Jesus left his place in heaven with the Father to get a "worm's eye view" of what it was like to be human. It was God's plan that Jesus fully understood what it was like to be human before he rescued us from the prison of our humanness and sin.

While I don't know if Yunus claims to be "Christian"... his act of getting a "worm's eye view" is more like Christ than what I have been willing to do in my own life many times.

And that challenges me.