A Needy World and A God Who Sees

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“Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.”
Matthew 25:34-36 ESV

When we lived in Spain there were neighborhood gypsies who begged outside the supermarkets and on the street corners.

In our neighborhood it was a woman with a child the same age as Owen. She would sit outside the grocery store and beg for money or food. Many times when I headed into the store she’d be there. I’d give her a smile, acknowledging her, and silently thinking how sweet it was that we had babies the same age. As I walked through the store I’d grab a clementine for her son. And on the way out the door, juggling my grocery bags and baby Owen and his stroller, I’d hand her the clementine and a coin.

It became a part of my routine, to put a coin in my pocket for that gypsy woman and to pick up a clementine for her son. I was actually kind of sad when she wasn’t there.

I didn’t know her but I liked her. I saw her. I worried about her.

I often wondered about her home life. I had read stories about the intricate scams that the gypsy people would create to “earn” money on the streets of Barcelona. I hoped that she made enough each day to escape a beating, as I had heard was common in that community.

I didn’t know her but I liked her. I saw her. I worried about her.

Barcelona was a much bigger city than Colorado Springs, but because we got around by walking instead of driving, we saw the city and its people up close.

Those beautiful opportunities to love my neighbor are lost in Colorado Springs, because I don’t see my neighbors in the city. I don’t watch their little boys grow at the same pace as my own. I don’t hand them a clementine every other day.

Those beautiful opportunities to love my neighbor are lost in Colorado Springs, because I don’t see them.

In a letter to a friend in 1946, C. S. Lewis pointed out this disadvantage of our increasingly global community:

“It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know).”

I believe that we are meant to see the needs of the people around us and to step in in small ways every day to minister to them in the name of Jesus. But instead I drive around town in my car with tinted windows, averting my eyes from the people holding signs on street corners.

I know that our city has churches and ministries and systems in place to care for those needs. I believe it when the managers of those organizations tell me that it is actually best to let them care for the needy people in a large city such as ours.

But the problem with our modern experience of the world’s difficulties is that it is too sterile. I’m too protected. I don’t look the hurting world in their eyes every day and wonder if they will be okay tonight.