The Homeless--Any Prospects?

Every night, nearly 200,000 homeless veterans sleep on the streets. “A disgrace,” says former Secretary of Veteran Affairs, Jesse Brown, “that we have men and women who served in American uniform who are out on the streets with no place to go and few prospects for a better life.”

The little bit of information above came from the web site, linked here, of Dignity Memorial, a homeless veterans’ burial program that provides free, appropriate funeral services for qualified homeless veterans. That’s a generous gesture.

But what about their lives? Are they to be left alone under a bridge or on a park bench until death, and then washed, dressed, and buried in a decent way? I believe I see some irony here.

A Google search shows this linked web site of National Homeless.org. After much beating around of the proverbial bush about studies and assumptions, the author says

the total number of homeless people in the United States is “approximately

3.5 million people, 1.35 million of them children,” according to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. That is a disgrace.

The United States has the reputation of being one of the most advanced, wealthiest, least hungry nations in the world; many generous Christians live in this country, and the church is not persecuted. Why would so many people be destitute? Is our love too small?

Mark Labberton is the author of a Christianity Today article entitled “The Lima Bean Gospel.” He posits that the church today does not give much evidence of obeying the gospel call; maybe it isn’t politically correct to be zealous, and we worry about that. Labberton says:

Jesus Christ, the Lord of Creation, Redemption, and Fulfillment, calls the church the salt and light of the world. Jesus seems to have had in mind a community engaged in vigorous, self-sacrificing mission that goes to great lengths to enact costly love, that inconveniences itself regularly to seek justice for the oppressed, that creatively serves the forgotten, all to portray that the kingdom of God is at hand.

Depending on where we look in the world, however, that church seems to have gone missing.

We should take a close look at ourselves. When Jesus said we should love God with our whole beings and love our neighbors as ourselves, he meant it; he said those two commandments embody all the ten commandments.

If we truly loved our neighbors as ourselves, we would be loving sacrificially. It's pretty clear that we are usually quite willing to go to great lengths to ensure satisfaction of our own needs. So, logically, if we loved others as ourselves, we'd be more than willing to help people who suffer dire need.

The fact that we, the whole body of Christ, are not willing to act in sacrificial ways shows that our concept of God's love is indeed too small.

As Labberton points out, our God is the creator of the universe, including “300 kinds of hummingbirds” and great diversity among human beings. He says Christianity has been accused of being too bland and weak to offer any answers to the huge diversity of overlapping cultures today. We act as if our love—our gospel—is small.

The only answers, he argues, that will show Christ to the world “will require us to consider again that very thing Jesus says is central to God's kingdom, the most life-enlarging and non-homogenizing reality: love.”

The Bible says we should show our love in actions, not just talk about it:

If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence. 1 John 3:17-19

Love is the most powerful force in the universe. If the Christian church worldwide wanted to, it would act out this love, the sacrificial love of Christ. And then 200,000 homeless veterans would not have to wait around until they die to get help. Over 3.5 million other homeless people, including children, would not have "few prospects."

*I borrowed this picture from the "Oldtimer Speaks Out" blog; Oldtimer said the picture came from Flickr .

The Homeless--Any Prospects?

https://connectionsgodandtheworld.blogspot.com/2008/01/every-night-nearly-200000-homeless.html

Thursday Thirteen: Subway Hero

Last week, a man named Wesley Autrey became a hero in New York City when he saved the life of a young man who had a seizure and fell onto the subway tracks before an oncoming train. Here are some thoughts about that:

• He acted instantly. He turned his two little girls over to a woman standing nearby and leaped onto the tracks to help Cameron Hollopeter, an 18-year-old film student.

• He had little time to think about it, but obviously, he thought this boy was worth saving at the risk of his own life.

• It must have been a split-second reaction. He said he tried to help Hollopeter up out of the tracks.

• When Hollopeter couldn’t get up, Autrey made another split-second decision. The train was getting very close.

• Autrey smashed himself down on top of Hollopeter and held him down with his head, arms, and legs. The train roared over them, smudging Autrey’s toboggan.

• Not only could the train have killed them both, but the track was charged with thousands of volts of electricity. Autrey kept the young man from touching the tracks on either side of them.

• What would I have done in that situation?

• I think I would have smacked my hand over my mouth and uttered a cry of some sort. Then I probably would have just stood there with my mouth hanging open, watching the train run over Hollopeter. I might have said, “No, no, no!”

• I’d rather think I would have helped him as Autrey did, but I don’t believe the thought of jumping onto the tracks would have ever entered my mind.

• What he did shows amazing courage and deep, sincere care and concern for other people. People are always touched by stories of such things.
  

• We’re told in the Bible that we should love God with our whole heart, mind, body, and strength and love other people as much as we love ourselves.

• If we have that kind of love, given by the Holy Spirit, then we would feel great concern for other people. We would be willing to help people—most helping ways don’t (thank God) involve leaping onto train tracks.

• Somebody asked Autrey if he had any words for other people. He said something like “New Yorkers! If somebody needs help, help ‘em!”
  

Thursday Thirteen: Subway Hero

https://connectionsgodandtheworld.blogspot.com/2007/01/thursday-thirteen-subway-hero.html

Forgiveness and Love

Gattina wrote a comment on my entry "Love Others..." a few days ago. She said,

I really admire these people having such a faith in god. But I think even people without any believe also could do that. In my opinion you don't have to be a christian and believe in god to be a good and selfishless human. It depends on your character. I think nobody would know himself enough to know the way he would react in such a situation.

Gattina—I think you are right, in some ways.

I think it is entirely possible for people who don’t necessarily believe in God to be good, generous, compassionate, and forgiving. And it is true that no one knows how he would react in a situation like this. But I believe the circumstances here are unusual—the Amish families' forgiveness and the older girl’s self-sacrifice, both. In both, I see great acts of love, beyond what the usual person could give.

I believe average people, believers or not, would have a very difficult time forgiving a man who murdered their children. Believers and nonbelievers both struggle with the need to forgive.

We have a fairly easy time forgiving people when they cheat us in games, when they cut in front of us in traffic, if they talk behind our backs, and maybe even if they are unfaithful in marriage. But the death of a child is one of the very hardest things to deal with—we are supposed to die before our children do. We are not supposed to have to outlive them, especially because of murder. When they forgave Charles Carl Roberts, they sacrificed their self-serving desire to lash out at his family, to hate him. That's what most people would have done.

And the thirteen-year-old girl who offered herself, in hopes that the younger girls might be saved—I believe such acts of selfless sacrifice come from the heart of God. It reminds me of the self-sacrifice of the character Sydney Carton in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, in exchange for the life of Charles Darnay, for the love of his family. It reminds me of God’s sacrifice of Jesus, in exchange for our deserved punishment, for love of us.

First John 3:20 says, “For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” And verse 23 says, “this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us." Chapter 4, verse 10 says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” And verse 12 says, “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

Unconditional, sacrificial love is powerful. To be able to love like that takes great faith in God and comprehension of his love. We are called to love the way God does—to love people regardless of the return, regardless of how we are treated.

Forgiveness and Love

https://connectionsgodandtheworld.blogspot.com/2006/10/forgiveness-and-love.html

Love Others . . .

Sacrificial love has for some years been a concern of mine. Exactly what does it mean? What does it require of us?

I wrote a series of posts about sacrificial love back in January, in case you wish to read them. I will write about it again, I am sure! I am deeply touched by the Amish people's reaction to the murder of some of their little girls a little over a week ago.

On the “Beta” version of Blogger, we can’t do “blog this” yet; maybe we will soon be able to do it. So in the meantime, I want you to read this excellent piece written by Andrew Thompson, who writes the blog “Gen-X Rising.”

Greater Love Has No One Than This . . .
posted Monday, Oct. 9, by Andrew Thompson

It was one week ago today that a milk truck driver named Charles Carl Roberts walked into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and shot 10 Amish schoolgirls between the ages of 6 and 13. He killed 5 of them and himself. The horrifying and senseless nature of the crime has been placed in bold relief by the reaction of the Amish community, which has both forgiven Roberts and reached out to his widow and children.

Those terrible few minutes in the schoolhouse were also witness to an incredibly powerful act of Christian self-giving. A recent CNN story reports that Marian Fisher, one of the murdered schoolgirls, asked Roberts that she be shot first because she thought it might serve to save some of the younger girls. Her younger sister Barbie, who was seriously wounded but survived, has related the story to adults.

Think about that for a second. Could you make such a sacrifice? Could I?

That 13-year old girl could, and she did. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

This is love as Jesus taught it. It wastes no energy on sentimentality or ephemeral "feelings." It is grounded in a disposition of self-giving and expressed in acts of self-sacrifice. It is the love that all Christians are called to receive and express, however imperfectly.

Faced with monstrous evil, Marian Fisher responded in the most sublime way possible for a Christian - she offered her life for the lives of her sisters.

Love Others . . .

https://connectionsgodandtheworld.blogspot.com/2006/10/love-others.html