The call to watch your world is a shift in perspective. You are no longer content to mind your own affairs, but you are now interested in the betterment of a larger world. There is a major difference in minding your personal affairs and watching your world. Watching your world requires you to steer your world towards a desirable future. This is a call to a higher level of responsibility, and ought to be approached with much thoughtfulness. Your goal is not to help a person or two. The goal is to change the world in such a way that the results obtained within that world glorifies God.
Here is an illustration to help us understand this. Imagine that there was a fallen tree on the road, there are a number of ways the problem could be handled. The obvious solution would be to remove the fallen tree, ensuring that free flowing traffic is restored once again. However, there is another option, albeit lazy (and irresponsible). Every driver could try to drive around it. We could walk around the fallen tree one-by-one. This illustration demonstrates how we focus on personal ambition, short-term gains, and ignore the deeper problems in our world.
Your goal is not to sidestep the fallen tree. Your goal is to remove the tree and restore the free flow of traffic. If your world is more likely to produce illiterates, mediocres, louts and poor people. The solution is not to help a person or a dozen people to escape their fate. You have to identify the institutions responsible for the outcomes and work to destroy the system. You want to mold a future whereby people living in your world are more likely to be literate than illiterate. A new system that makes it possible to be productive, and enjoy a prosperous future. Watching your world is not about providing relief to a few people. It is about engineering a better society.
