When Helping Hurts

I am so excited because I am going clubbing...  Book-clubbing.

Was that too corny?  Sorry.

Anyway, the ladies in this city as well as some people I don't know from other parts of the globe have started a little book club and our first book is When Helping Hurts.  Check out Shanda's blog  for instructions if you want to join... we're only on the introduction so it's not too late to join.


I'm late in blogging on the first section, so my apologies to those who have been waiting anxiously for my opinions! 


In the forward, Brian writes: 
Have you ever done anything to hurt poor people?  Most of you would answer no to this question, but the reality is that you may have done considerable harm to poor people in the very process of trying to help them.  The federal government made this mistake for decades.  Well intentioned welfare programs penalized work, undermined families and created dependence.  The government hurt the very people it was trying to help.  Unfortunately, the same is true for many Christian ministries today.  By focusing on symptoms rather than on the underlying disease, we are often hurting the very people we are trying to help.  Surprisingly, we are also hurting ourselves in the process.  As followers of Jesus Christ, we simply must do better.

We've all been taught "Give a man a fish: feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish: feed him for a lifetime."  but we've also been taught "every little bit helps."  so while we know that it would be better to give that homeless man a 'way of life' we rationalize the five-dollar bill we're about to give him and think "every little bit helps."  It's always nagged at me, but this book is making concrete the thought floating in my brain that there has to be a better way to spend this five dollars.

Having worked at the Raleigh Rescue Mission  (oh Emma I miss YOU!!) I've seen first-hand what it looks like when Christian society stops treating the symptoms of poverty and tries to heal the wound.  I always thought is was so strange that the men and women would skip a nutritious, FREE, hot meal in the cafeteria because they had food stamps and would rather go to the grocery store and fill up on potato chips. Didn't see the food stamps back-firing, did they?

 If anything, those food stamps and other government hand-outs were keeping those men and women there, rather than just being down on their luck.  At the Raleigh Rescue Mission, people that wanted to stay a long amount of time could only stay if they agreed to take classes and agreed to strict guidelines of living.  There, men and women could get their GED, take computer classes, go to counseling and had daily Bible studies.  I think this is exactly the type of program this book is promoting.

Later in the preface I learned this: The average North American enjoys a standard of living that has been unimaginable for most of human history.  Meanwhile, 40% of the earth's inhabitants eke out an existence on less than two dollars per day.

I like what Shanda said in her blog post:

I’ve seen poverty around the world. I’ve seen faces of some of those 40 percent who struggle to eat every day. In fact, even here in my Asia home… Yesterday, I went into the city to spend a day doing some work at Starbucks. I walked by beggars who likely own next to nothing, and I thought about the contents of the tote-bag under my arm: my laptop, my kindle, my ipod. That’s over $1,000 US worth of electronics that I use everyday, and carry around under my arm – like it’s no big deal. I wondered how long it takes people like the beggars I see on the street to earn $1,000. And I’ve seen many people even “worse off.” Faces that are embedded into my heart’s memory. I have a responsibility to them/to God.

I'm excited to dive into the rest of the book and learn more about my responsibility.  I'm a stay at home mom and my husband is a part-time English teacher... and still I'm RICH. I have two TV's in my house, two computers, a giant refrigerator, several pairs of clothes and an air-conditioner unit that runs 24/7 to keep me at the perfectly comfortable temperature.  Not only do I have a financial responsibility, I have a spiritual responsibility.  I look at how Jesus lived his life on earth, meeting people's physical needs while he was here to meet our spiritual need for Salvation.  Those two things were hand in hand, not mutually exclusive.  How in the world can I drop money in the beggars hand without telling him the Good News?  and how can I preach the Good News to him while ignoring his physical state?

This book has got my wheels turning, and the thought I'm most pondering is that we can do the right thing the wrong way.  We can do ministry, evangelism, charity- everything, really, the wrong way.  I also love that the authors are using Scripture to show us the way.