One of my biggest struggles growing in my faith, is learning how to help and love others like Jesus. Looking at the current state of our nation and world, it is evident just how much brokenness we have. We know we are called to love others and aid them, but how can we do that without unintentionally harming them? Through our unit on poverty, I became so much more informed on how to help without hurting.
When we learned how a Christian should respond to poverty and how we can help. I started to think back to my youth group days and some of the short-term missions I have seen others going on. Often these missions have great intentions behind them, but they often hurt more than help. By going and providing labor that takes away from local workers. Or supporting and loving on orphaned kids only to leave three days later. So, if this is not how we can help than what is?
I believe that when it comes to missions, we should help support long term missionaries and the local church in the area who know where the aid can actually be used. I went to Puerto Rico in 2018 after hurricane Maria to do disaster relief work there. While we were there we were partnered with a local church. We were able to help the church serve the community that they were already serving in. That way we were not taking away from any of the locals. I think it is important to connect with the locals before sending aid, so you can know where to help without taking something away from the community.
After this unit, I read a few experts from the book When Helping Hurts, I recommend checking it out if this is something you would like to learn more about.
When Helping Hurts - The Chalmers Center
Hello Hannah,
Loving others will probably always be a struggle, more so when hurt and or finances are involved. It would be nice if we could throw money at poverty to make it go away, but that's where education has to come in as it is severely lacking. Anything from how to start, or run a business to which business would be a great start. How to manage money would of course also be another great start.
A major part of addressing poverty is knowing the needs of the people and having a relationship. Having anyone, such as your mentioned missionaries, that are able to establish these relationships and address the needs back to us is crucial to actually helping people in need. The last thing you want to do is give money to an addict so they can ruin themselves further, or as you mentioned unknowingly taking away from what little a community has. Some people have lunch bags of socks and toothbrushes in them for the homeless here, others will buy them a few dollars worth of food so as to prevent feeding an addiction. Also without the relationship, who's to say the person is really in poverty?
Great insights,
Daniel Whitten