From The “If I was God, I’d be Pissed” files:
I’ve heard this way too many times lately from way too many people: “They need to stop looking for handouts and take some responsibility for themselves – you know, pull themselves up by their bootstraps!”. It’s the Great American Tradition, right? Start from nothing, work your way up, become successful all without anyone’s help, doing it all on your own? That’s what our country’s built on, right?
It’s such crap.
It blows my mind that any Christian could believe they’ve earned anything in this life. The Cross should remind us all that it is only by the literal grace of God that we are salvaged from sin. Yet we walk around in our little judgmental bubbles all day, presuming to render verdicts on whether someone is worthy of assistance (in any form) from us. God would probably find this irony quite amusing, if it didn’t completely ignore the supreme sacrifice His Son made two millennia ago.
This article from ChurchRelevance.com ought to be a good reminder of how broken our world is. It reports that nearly half of children in the U.S. reside in a household that will need food stamps at some point in their life. A staggering 90% of black kids, and 91% of kids in a single-parent household. And 25% of all children will be in a household that is on food stamps for 5 years or more.
Those kids have done nothing wrong, yet they will grow up socially and developmentally stunted because of their circumstances. And as adults, they are statistically far more likely to end up incarcerated, impoverished, or dead than someone from a stable home. Did they deserve this? Yet we look at the many in society who exist in the ghettos and hovels and think, “Why don’t they make something of themselves? It must be their culture/laziness/greed/stupidity/etc.”
We don’t know if their childhoods were like that of the kids in that study. We can’t always see physical illness, much less mental illness – we just assume they’re as capable as many of us are, and have been given the same opportunities we have. We don’t know what truly lies at the heart of the men begging on the street. Put simply, we have no place to judge one another, no matter what we think we know about them.
We’re called as fellow Christians to serve one another. The Son of God washed the very feet of the apostles, men as utterly beyond salvation and as guilty as any of us in living captive to sin. And I’m guessing those feet were pretty foul. That’s our example. That means that whether or not people abuse our generosity, we give anyway. Whether it’s government programs or private charities, we make sure we have a safety net for those who are falling, whether or not some are undeserving (in our judgment).
Our society is a busted-ass setup that doesn’t let anyone and everyone pull themselves out of the depths of despair – it’s a random drawing of circumstance. And any one of us are inches from losing everything, if the ball bounces the wrong way – our jobs, our homes, our families, everything. None of us are immune from ever finding ourselves in the position where those kids and their families are.
Forget the virtual churches, the multimedia worship experiences, the church iPhone apps. In the end we serve. We don’t serve the worthy, we just serve. Our first and foremost goal ought to be to make sure no one needs food stamps anymore – that we all have enough to eat, a warm place to sleep and a safe place to live. I don’t pretend I know how to pull that off, but I do know that the first step to this is to ditch the judgment of worth as a prerequisite to service.
Preach it, brother!