If All You Can Do Is Crawl, CRAWL!!!

Fred and I worked together for a number of years as pastors. I love his work and family. Plus he has the heart of a true pastor. He is a published author with some good books out there, and a blog too, from which this post is taken. I hope you are as provoked by this piece as much as I was. You can always head to his blog for more. Enjoy the read

They remain the most terrifying nights of my childhood years. We would be jolted out of our sleep by screams and traditional distress calls indicating that a family in the community had been attacked and their livestock stolen. The rest of the community would join in amplifying the distress calls. The cacophony would last anything from two to four hours. As the women kept the alarm bells ringing, the men would group and pursue the raiders. Sometimes they would recover the stolen animals but mostly they didn’t.

When a homestead was attacked, there was little a family could do to repel the raiders; they were outnumbered and out-armed. Any attempt to come out of the house was a step towards injury or even death. They did the only one thing they could do; scream at the top of their voices and alert the community that they needed help.

That’s all they could do; and that’s what they did.

Some of the situations that life throws at us are often way beyond our capacity. They call for money we do not have, strength that we cannot muster, numbers that we cannot put together and influence we have no access to. This however does not justify our lying down and handing over the entire burden of our responsibilities to others. No matter how big our problem, there is always that thing we can - and should - do for ourselves before expecting others to come to our aid.

Being a pastor, marriage and weddings are never far from my time or prayers. But as happy as I am when I hear that two desire to get married, I’m often saddened by some of the presumptions that accompany these plans. It is not unusual to find couples that have planned a wedding, and an accompanying budget, that is to be financed entirely by “friends”. No doubt a wedding is one of those things whose financial demands are beyond most people. However, I still refuse to sanction wedding plans that have no evidence of initial self-effort on the part of the couple.

We live in a time when people have this mistaken assumption that having problems, or being poor, exempts us from being responsible for our lives. We harangue the government and our more successful brothers for not helping us. While no person can claim to be beyond the need for the help of others, the hard reality is that there is simply no dignity in having others take over our responsibilities. It’s an indignity we should endure only in unavoidable circumstances.

The mark of God’s blessing upon our lives is not having people press bank notes into our hands. Rather it is us being able to be available to lend a hand when circumstances so demand. I do not consider it a blessing to have a financially well-endowed wife who covers all the household bills so that I may be free to do as I wish with my side of the family finances. The reverse is equally repulsive. Such endowment should not release one from responsibility but rather enable them to bear more responsibility, and be a blessing to others.

There will always be those in our families or the wider society whose situations are irredeemable and they simply have to live with the indignity of having others carry their God-given responsibilities. There will always be that nephew or niece that will never get an education unless someone intervenes. Giving them an opportunity to build a future for themselves is a beautiful thing. It becomes ugly when physically endowed, reasonably educated, believing Christians demote themselves to a little more than beggars to avoid doing something for themselves in the name of Christian love.

Assistance should be just that, assistance. It is a hand given to one who has done all they know to do but still find themselves in the middle of the raging waters. It’s not a hand given to one who can swim but prefers to ride to safety on the backs of others.

So before you send out that distress call, have you done what you know to do to reverse your situation? As you ask others to pray for you, have you prayed for yourself? As you ask others to give up their savings to assist you, do you have a little savings of your own that they will add to? As you call your neighbours to help pay your daughter’s university fees, have you something – no matter how small – that indicates your own commitment to the cause?

We all need a little helping hand here and there. And we are grateful when we receive it. If we however allow ourselves to become numb to the indignity that comes with being perpetual beneficiaries of the largesse of others, we should not wonder when the number of our friends begins to dwindle. If we develop a taste for abandoned carcasses and road kills, we should not be surprised when we start receiving looks and treatment that spell "s-c-a-v-e-n-g-e-r." And you know there is no such thing as a dignified scavenger.



"If all you can do is crawl, start crawling." Rumi

By Fred Geke

(http://fredgeke.com)