Right, serious real-world talk about religion coming up. 
If you’re just here for the fantasy, feel free to skip this one. I’m responding honestly to questions here, not proselytizing the uninterested.
Humanitarian Work and Religious Experience
So this is asking about my former day job. I’ve worked in the global humanitarian anti-poverty sector for a couple of decades, initially with secular institutions and since 2008 with Christian ones. I’ve worked for the longest stretches in Nepal and Afghanistan, but had a few years that took me all over the world (as past forum posts from Somaliland, Darfur, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Congo, etc. can attest). I grew up in a Christian mission here in Nepal, where my father was a civil engineer building hospitals and dams.
Saying this kind of work is done “in the name of humanity” covers over significant differences in people’s actual driving motivations (even the ones who are doing it for reasons that go deeper than salary, the thriving social scene, or the itch to travel). Dig deeper, and some are doing it out of a sense of justice/fairness, some out of charity/pity, some because they’re utliitarians who believe it’s the best way to get to the greatest good for the greatest number, some out of a not-especially-religious-or-mystical idea of karma… there’s no single ethical reason that unites everyone.
To do it in the name of God doesn’t necessarily exclude or displace any of those other reasons. You can believe that the God you worship and imitate has a unique concern for the poor, and also that it’s a matter of justice etc. For a lot of theists, their beliefs about God and their ethical beliefs are so closely intertwined that trying to separate them feels like a category error. “Yes, in theory if I didn’t believe in God I might still believe in this and do this…but since I do believe in God, it’s weirdly artificial to talk about my beliefs and vocation without mentioning that our Creator wants us to treat each other this way, and models it in His own life.”
In the course of my work, I’ve seen my share of laziness, manipulativeness, waste, and ineffectiveness; but I’ve also worked with heroic people from just about every religious and non-religious background. I’m enthusiastically in favor of people helping the poor and doing other good things for nonreligious reasons, or religious reasons that aren’t my own. I’m also a raised-Lutheran evangelical Protestant, so I’ve got no gripe with the idea that
I don’t think helping other people gets you to heaven, or offsets sins (though I recognize that plenty of other people do believe that, coming from a wide range of religious traditions).
So what significant difference do I think my Christianity has made in my line of work? The first thing is related to the point I just discussed: grace. The humanitarian sector is driven by idealism; but that just makes it a particularly stark locus for what G.K. Chesterton supposedly said was the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine. (The closest properly attributed quote I’ve been able to find was a bit wordier.) No committed idealist succeeds in perfectly living out their ideals. At the end of the quest to live ethically, we all fail.
I said that offhandedly once to a non-religious colleague from Oxfam, and I’ll never forget how much it horrified her. The idea that she might not be able to satisfactorily live out her deepest ideals hit her at the core of her identity. The humanitarian sector is full of people who’ve been burned out and broken by that fear being borne out in reality.
And I could so easily be one of them. I’m an idealist, strongly driven by the desire to do real and meaningful good for people in need. I’m a workaholic who finds it hard to put boundaries on my effort as long as the need persists. And I’m an honest critic (or try to be) who refuses to close my eyes to the fact that so much work in our sector aims low – aiming only to make one or another aspect of the life of poverty a little more bearable, not to actually get people out of poverty – and that relatively few organizations manage to do good that (in my view) is proportionate to the money they receive.
Brought together, that’s a recipe for burning myself right out, as I learned the hard way in Afghanistan. I know there are others who have found other ways out of the trap…but the only thing on my personal internal horizon that helps me bear the inability to live up to my ideals is the experience of Christ’s grace being bigger.
One of the more striking religious experiences I’ve had was when I came back to the UK, thoroughly burned out by overwork and being partly responsible for the death of a friend (not for the first time). I was still very much assuming that God’s plan was to heal me up and get me back into the saddle. When I went in to receive prayer in a London church, the folks praying for me offered various images, thoughts, verses, etc. that had come to them. I thanked them and said a few words about what I thought it all meant – that God was telling me I was almost ready for the next round of service.
And a woman who didn’t know me or what I’d been through said, “No…no, I think that’s completely wrong.” (This is not something one generally hears in charismatic Anglican prayer sessions like this – it’s bad form to try to interpret for someone else, let alone against someone else.) “I’m pretty sure God is telling you that you need to stop thinking about doing so much. You’re hearing all this as if He wants you to do, do, do. I think He’s calling you to be. Be with Him. Rest in Him. Give yourself grace.”
It hit me like a ton of bricks, because I hadn’t been expecting it at all – and because it was true. That was what I needed. If God was inseparable from my calling to love the poor, He’s been even more essential to my ability to know peace and live with the inevitable inadequacies, failures, and tragedies that have followed from my efforts.
Part of “grace” also is the belief that when I’ve reached the end of my efforts and they’ve not been enough, I can still pray – and that there are plenty of worldly problems too big for my efforts that may still yield to prayer. A lot of folks reading this will probably have a reflexively scornful reaction to that; “thoughts and prayers” are such an inadequate trope when they take the place of action.
But when you’re already at the limits of action and action feels inadequate, it’s empowering to be able to ask for help. On my first visit to Mugu, a remote corner of Nepal, I ran into an infuriating and deeply entrenched system of injustice that was keeping the schools empty (you can read some of the stories here). We were fighting that system, but it was fighting back, literally, with thugs from the local political parties coming to rough up our partner staff for getting people talking about why there were no teachers in their government schools. The corruption system was a lot bigger and a lot stronger than any NGO.
Having done all I could to encourage and advise the team, before we left I prayed over that valley, for a breaking of the system of injustice and a reopening of the schools. And over the next few years, the political system shifted and (remarkably) brought honest people into the essential local positions of power, in ways we had no control or influence over. When I went back in 2022, the schools were open. Whether or not you’re open to the idea that God played a role, I can attest to the role of prayer in fending off despair and keeping hope alive when confronting massive structural problems.
The second significant impact: guidance. In 2008 I left the deeply broken USAID system in Afghanistan and joined a Christian INGO whose work I deeply respected. I knew they were still working in Kandahar, even after the abduction and likely (only very recently confirmed) death of an expat there. That was troubling and more than a little scary, given that I’d had 11 colleagues murdered nearby three years earlier, and (to my knowledge) things had only gone downhill since then, security-wise.
On my first day of induction, I asked about our security plan and what would cause us to close down the Kandahar office. That was when I found out that the only reason we were still there at all was that my predecessor and boss had very consistently and clearly felt God telling them, in prayer, that we needed to stay in Kandahar.
I’ve never been so scared in my life–not when our project was targeted for murder by the Taliban in Helmand, not when I almost drowned or died of altitude sickness in Nepal, not when I was rolling around Kirkuk or in eyeshot of Daesh-occupied Mosul–as I was at that moment in a quiet Middlesex office building. I mentally informed God: It’s great that You’ve spoken to them both so clearly, Lord…but if we’re going to stay in Kandahar on my watch, you’re going to need to tell me too. And I don’t mean a gentle feeling in the heart. I need words. I need something that puts me beyond doubt. Otherwise I’m pulling us out.
We went back to Afghanistan for handover with my predecessor, and I prayed and listened. No word, no guidance. I snuck down to Kandahar for a few days, met the local team, got out before the Taliban found out I was there. No word, no guidance. It was increasingly clear that ECHO was unhappy with continuing to fund work down in Kandahar, because it was too dangerous to send expats down (and because ECHO was too stubbornly colonialist-minded to accept project monitoring by Afghan professionals). We were coming up to the point when I was going to formally take over. I was ready (and more than a bit relieved) to conclude that God’s silence meant that my handover was the right time for us to close down the Kandahar office.
And then I was visiting Aqcha, up north on the other side of the country. We weren’t a proselytizing outfit, but mutual friends had introduced me to one or two Afghan Christians, and I met one of them up there for prayer and encouragement. Let’s call him Khairullah. I’d heard that his small Christian house church community had recently lost a member to murder; they were pretty sure it was an honor killing, because the man’s family had found out he’d converted. I’d expected Khair would want to pray with me for the safety of his family and fellow-believers.
But although the murder clearly saddened and concerned him, it was almost an afterthought for him that evening. Khair, who also worked with a humanitarian organization, was totally preoccupied with the coming drought. He’d just received a forecast saying that it was likely to be the worst drought in forty years…and it was breaking his heart for the villages where he (and we) worked. He knew how inadequate any humanitarian aid would be for them if all their crops failed. All he really wanted us to pray about was to avert the drought.
I was incredibly moved. Here was a man whose friend had just been murdered for his beliefs, whose family was clearly in danger…and he wanted above all to pray for the villagers he served, some of whom would have gladly murdered him if they knew his religious identity. Khair’s love of the poor and love of enemy were so manifestly, powerfully sincere. We prayed against the drought together.
I woke up that night to the sound of rain bucketing down on the roof – unexpected, unforecast, the one big rain Aqcha would get in that drought year, enough for melons and a few other hardy crops to survive. And I heard a voice clearly in my mind: This is your answer. Be rain in Kandahar.
We stayed. Through the loss of ECHO funding (and, after many sleepless proposal-writing nights, its replacement with Canadian and American aid money); through the mayor of Kandahar ranting at us and accusing us of helping the Taliban because of our water supply projects in the slums; through an insurgent-police gun battle a hundred-odd yards away while I hid under the stairs, knowing that if they’d got word there was an expat in the office, there was nothing stopping them from breaking in to grab me.
We stayed and saved some lives, and didn’t lose a single staff member, in a place I would never have stayed without a religious experience very specifically telling me to keep the work going there. The not losing anyone was a rare grace – certainly not guaranteed by a message calling us to be poured out like rain. My late friend Tom Little answered the call to stay much more radically, through the worst years of Afghan history, and died for that willingness.
Like I said on another thread where I told an abbreviated version of this story, I’m not sharing the experience because I think it proves anything about God to a skeptic. It’s reasonable to have priors by which you treat the kind of experience I’ve described as a wish-fulfilling delusion. Maybe especially when the guy writing it is a fantasy author in his spare time.
But I hope it gives some insight into your question, @11110. It’s great for people to do this kind of work for the sake of humanity alone. But for my part, I do my work in the name of God because my whole experience of it – what drives me, what keeps me balanced and sane, what pushes me into difficult and challenging places – is inseparable from my experience of God. If I talk about it in any but the shallowest way, I’ve got to talk about God.