Help!

     Yesterday I finished Rob Bell and Don Golden's Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile.  You want to know how a book is good?  It's really quite simple:  it stays with you.  You chew on the marrow, it boils in your blood.  It invades your brain.

     I have been invaded.  The thoughts followed me home from work.  I have the misfortune of working in retail, and yesterday I had the unpleasant task of ringing up a woman and her four year old brat.  I love children, so when I say brat, I mean brat.  As I scanned their items, I had no choice but to listen to Mommy Dearest as she bragged about her daughter's dozens of shoes, all her clothes, the new bedroom they were decorating for her.  She spent $600 like it was nothing.  I was physically nauseous.  It was disgusting.

     You know what else is disgusting?  We Americans make up only 5% of the world population, yet we have over half the world's wealth.  While people are starving, we are worrying about whether or not we have cool clothes, the latest technology, the biggest TV.  And I'm not just talking about people in third-world countries that live on the equivalent of mere dollars a day.  They need our help, but there is so much we can do here, now.  People in my town (I've met a couple personally), in your town(!) are starving.  People who seem like anyone else are struggling to live, to feed their families.  What's heartbreaking is that many of them are honest, hard-working people with bad luck.  But we as a society have such an "everyone for themselves" attitude that no one is willing to help, to lend a hand, to let someone else know that they're not alone.  Whether we like to admit it, we've all been in that position.

     So why aren't we doing anything?  Why do we hide in our cozy houses, behind all our possessions and money and false security?  If we have so much, why can't we share it?  We have so much, would we really miss it when giving it would mean so much to someone else?  If we can't give money, we can give time.  There are so many places to volunteer-- soup kitchens, homeless shelters, even animal shelters.  Having no money doesn't mean you have an excuse.




Want to help someone?  Check out a charitable organization or two: 

Compassion International 
One Day's Wages 
Blood Water Mission
Red Cross
To Write Love on Her Arms