Look first at the hillside.
Before looking beneath the earth,
look at the people living above it.
House upon house climbs the mountain—
brick upon brick,
roof upon roof,
a geography of human endurance
rising toward the sky.
And somewhere far beneath these hills,
beneath the streets,
beneath the cities,
beneath the feet of children running through narrow passages,
lies one of the greatest petroleum inheritances on earth.
What a terrible contradiction:
a country enormously rich beneath the ground
and so many of its people struggling above it.
The barrel and the poverty
occupy the same nation.
The abundance and the scarcity
share the same map.
The treasure sleeps below
while necessity stays awake above.
And between them stands the question
that economics alone cannot answer:
Who controls the birthright?
There are nations poor because the earth gave them little.
And there are nations whose poverty is more difficult to explain—
nations beneath whose soil
lie fortunes large enough to illuminate cities,
build schools,
raise hospitals,
strengthen neighborhoods,
construct homes,
and prepare generations for futures
their parents could scarcely imagine.
Yet the wealth travels.
The barrel travels.
The capital travels.
The contracts travel.
The profits travel.
And sometimes poverty remains exactly where it was—
on the hillside.
Perhaps this is the cruelest geography of resource wealth:
the oil travels farther
than the prosperity.
Do not look at these homes
and see only poverty.
See inheritance waiting to become justice.
Every child standing on that hillside
stands above a national birthright.
Every mother carrying groceries
up those steep streets,
every worker leaving before sunrise,
every elder watching the city
from a doorway built into the mountain,
belongs to the human meaning
of the word resource.
For what is petroleum worth
if the people living above it
cannot build secure lives?
What is a billion barrels worth
if a child cannot find
a classroom worthy of her mind?
What is an oilfield worth
if the neighborhood beside it
remains forgotten?
What does it profit a nation
to possess treasure beneath its feet
while poverty climbs its hills?
And now the negotiators arrive.
They bring percentages.
Production estimates.
Investment projections.
Tax revenues.
Development rights.
Twenty-five years.
Perhaps longer.
Sixty-five billion barrels.
Numbers so enormous
that ordinary human beings
almost disappear inside them.
But do not allow them to disappear.
Put the hillside
back into the contract.
Put the neighborhood
beside the barrel.
Put the child
beside the percentage.
Put the future generation
beside the signature.
Then ask again:
Who owns this wealth?
Not merely legally.
Not merely politically.
Not merely commercially.
Ask morally.
The earth did not create petroleum
for presidents.
The mountain did not bury its treasure
for corporations.
The generations before us
did not leave their inheritance
so that one generation could behave
as though tomorrow had no claim upon it.
The resource is not merely something
to be extracted.
It is something
to be entrusted.
The barrel belongs to a market.
The birthright belongs to a people.
And the difference between them
is the beginning of justice.
Naboth understood this.
A king desired his vineyard.
The king could offer money.
The king could offer another field.
The king possessed greater power.
But Naboth answered from somewhere deeper
than economics:
“The LORD forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance
of my fathers unto thee.”
He understood that some things possess
a value beyond their price.
Inheritance carries memory.
Inheritance carries obligation.
Inheritance carries those who came before us
and those who will come after us.
The vineyard was not merely soil.
And Venezuela's petroleum
is not merely oil.
So before the world celebrates
another enormous agreement,
let someone climb the hillside.
Let someone enter the neighborhood.
Let someone sit beside the family
whose roof leaks when the rain comes.
Let someone ask the young person
what future he imagines.
Let someone ask the mother
what she would build
if the wealth beneath her nation
truly reached her children.
Then return to the negotiating table.
Perhaps the numbers
will look different.
For the true accounting
must contain three columns:
The Barrel.
What can be extracted.
The Poverty.
Who has been left behind.
The Birthright.
What must remain for those yet to come.
If we count only the first,
we have economics without humanity.
If we see only the second,
we may mistake suffering for destiny.
But if we remember the third,
we begin to understand stewardship.
The purpose of national wealth
cannot merely be to make the barrel rise.
It must help the people rise.
One day the final barrel
will leave the ground.
No petroleum reserve is infinite.
The drills will stop.
The pipelines will quiet.
The great contracts will become
documents in archives.
And another generation
will stand upon these same hills.
May they not look downward
into an emptied earth
and upward toward an unchanged poverty.
May they instead inherit schools,
homes,
hospitals,
roads,
knowledge,
institutions,
dignity,
and freedom.
May they say:
They extracted the oil,
but they did not extract our future.
They sold the barrel,
but they protected the birthright.
They found treasure beneath the nation—
and finally allowed that treasure
to become justice
among the people
living above it.
Pastor Street Gospel Lee
Street GMC Corps
August 30, 2026
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