Thank you for your post and your generosity. Not too long ago I was in a bubble like you but God had led me out of my comfort zone in a lot of ways.
We don’t have a lot of money to give, but we can all do little things. My 11 year old volunteers at the food pantry at church. We had our neighbor over for Christmas dinner so he wouldn’t be alone. We always have a collection bag for Goodwill in the laundry room and go to the donation center about every month. At work we collected a truck load of goods for a charity in Atlanta that does fantastic work helping people who are not on government assistance but need a little help.
He's got a way of breaking that bubble on us don't He?
For me, it was last Monday morning (12/19) as I was waking up. The alarm went off and I flipped the alarm switch to radio and heard a story about folks walking into Toys R US, WalMart, Target and other stores paying off other folk's lay-away accounts trying to help those in need.
A half hour later I saw the same story on the local early morning news. Shortly afterwards as I had my morning coffee, there was another story in the local paper about a woman who had her children's toys on lay-away at the local K-Mart. When she went to pay it off, she discovered a good samaritan had already done that for her.
That woman then decided to use the money that she would've used to pay off her lay-away account to pay off someone elses' at the store. Clearly, she "got it."
I about lost it right there at the kitchen table and my wife noticed something was wrong. As I handed her the paper I could only point to the article.
I could feel the 'tapping on my shoulder' that the man upstairs wanted me to do something, and part of me really wanted to run out at that moment and go to a few stores just to pay off a few lay-away accounts.
As my wife talked me down from that idea, the problem with it is that you really don't know who you're helping. As she explained it, some of her friends used lay-away to keep the toys out of the house and the kids from snooping. There was no guarantee I'd be helping someone who really needed it.
She works for our Church, so she hears all the terrible things people are going through in this economy, specially this time of year. The food pantry was her idea, she left it up to me to execute it.
God bless her soul, she knew what I was walking into when I went there. Me, I had no idea. Somewhere between her and the Lord they conspired together to break the bubble I was living in. I'm normally pretty emotional around Christmas time, having my bubble popped like that turned me into a complete emotional wreck, but now that my eyes are open to what's really going on, it's going to be pretty hard to turn a blind eye to it...