Helping not Hurting

Hello. It has been a while since I have written, a long while. I missed Food for Life many times after the birth of our daughter, and over the past couple of months I have really been integrating it back into my life now that our little girl is not so little any more and my parents are so generously willing to watch her for me. My husband and I have been reading a book that we borrowed from my dad called, "When Helping Hurts, Alleviating Poverty without Hurting the Poor and Ourselves." We both have been struck by a few key concepts during the reading that we have done thus far.

One concept that I am struck with is the fact that it is so easy for us as ministers of the gospel and as volunteers to separate ourselves from the people that we claim to be serving. We say that we are doing these acts of service because we care and we want to help, yet so many times as Christians we mentally separate ourselves from the very people we want to help, putting us in two different categories, this is "us" and "they" are over there. The question is, can we really effectively help them with that mentality without hurting them? Will we ever be able to determine what their real needs are and what the root cause of their homelessness is if we won't befriend them, and I mean truly befriend them? Paul and I feel convicted that the most important thing that we can do for them is not serve them a meal and give them a blanket. It is to share the gospel through friendship. We have to ask ourselves, "Are we truly their friend?" Because friends spend time together, sharing their lives with each other as equals. Obviously, any time we reach out in friendship to someone who struggles with addictions and possibly involves themselves in criminal behavior, caution is in order, but just because we need to proceed with caution, does not mean that we do not proceed at all. It is striking to me how many people will volunteer in the kitchen and in the serving line, but they will not even speak to the homeless people, let alone pull up chair and share an extensive conversation. That is frightening to some. It is difficult sometimes to realize that the homeless are people just like us. They have a past with hurts, they have feelings, they have struggles, and they need Jesus. Sure, they have made some bad decisions, but haven't we all? It is so easy to think, "Ya, but my bad decisions are not as bad as theirs, and why haven't they learned from their mistakes yet." However, life is a journey for us all. We all make bad decisions, and we all repeat the same mistakes over and over again and feel stupid for doing it. The difference is, most of us can hide our mistakes so that the whole world doesn't know what they are. We can't help them until we see ourselves when we look at them.

Over the next few months as Paul and I read this book, pray over the concepts, and share these concepts with the volunteers, we will be writing about the ways that we have found to integrate the concepts and what we are learning about ourselves as well as the people that God has placed in our lives.

~Charity