Fearfully and WonderfullySýnishorn

Person to Person 

My mailbox bulges with appeals from organizations involved in feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, visiting prisoners, housing refugees, combating sexual trafficking, healing the sick. Often I give because I’ve worked among such needs and I know these organizations do indeed spread love and compassion. It saddens me, though, that the only thread connecting millions of donors to that world is the impersonal medium of direct mail or email blasts—these offer no personal connection. 

If I only express love vicariously through a check or credit card, I will miss the person-to-person response that hands-on love summons up. Not all of us can serve in parts of the world where human needs abound. But all of us can visit prisons and homeless shelters, bring meals to shut-ins, and minister to single parents or foster children. 

The best illustration of this truth is Jesus Christ, the “express image” of God living on this planet. The book of Hebrews sums up his experience on earth by declaring that we now have a leader who can be touched with the feelings of our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15). God saw the need to come alongside us, not simply love us at a distance. 

Although we cannot change everything in the world, together we can strive to fill the earth with God’s presence and love. When we stretch out a hand to help, we stretch out the hand of Christ’s Body. 

I was privileged to know Mother Teresa, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in Calcutta among members of India’s lowest castes. Her order of sisters sought out the sick and dying in the streets and garbage dumps of Calcutta’s alleys. 

When journalist Malcolm Muggeridge observed firsthand the poverty of Calcutta, he returned to England to write about it with fire and indignation. Statistically, he admits, Mother Teresa did not accomplish much by rescuing stragglers from a sump of human need. He concludes with the statement, “But then Christianity is not a statistical view of life.” 

Indeed it is not. Not when a shepherd barely shuts the gate on his ninety-nine before rushing out, heartbroken and short of breath, to find the one that’s missing. Not when one rascal decides to repent and ninety-nine upstanding citizens are ignored as all heaven erupts in a great party (Luke 15:4-7). God’s love, agape love, is not statistical either.