I was speaking with a friend this morning about a mission trip he recently returned from. He & his wife talked about the disgust for how ‘we’ try to Americanize other cultures by bringing people in need our money and gifts. Its as if we throw an offering their way and carry on with our day. And what does that teach people? Well, it creates ‘beggers’ for one. Children have caught on to the ‘missionized’ way of life, thus they cling to foreigners for the things that will turn prosperity for their families. But I believe really what we’ve done is tried to ‘humanize’ other cultures, just as we ‘humanize’ each other.

In today’s fast pace, platonic way of living, when someone is in need, don’t we jump to this conclusion that ‘stuff’ will fix it? Money, a house, a car, maybe just a bag of groceries, if we could just provide these things for someone in need, we’d be helping them out. But think about it… as a creation in God’s image, it’s not really more ‘stuff’ our hearts are yearning or longing for. Our Heavenly Father, the model for our design, doesn’t want the ‘good works’ and things we can give over to Him. God longs for us to spend time with Him, to desire sharing our lives with Him. And as His children, we too have been born with this innate longing at the core of every need we have. We were created for relationship with each other… to have others long to spend time with us, to desire sharing their lives with us. And yet, there’s this perceived lack of time that prevents us from doing this each other, just as it hinders us from also sitting down with God.

Just as we don’t seek God only for His blessings, the hearts of people in need aren’t seeking us only for what we can tangibly provide. We seek God to know Him… that is how we show love and faithfulness to our Heavenly Father. With this example we have been given, we must understand that at the core of a person’s greatest need is simply a longing from their heart for us to get to know them; a desire for us to listen, understand, sympathize, hurt and grieve, rejoice and share in the seasons of life. We need to recognize the parallel this concept shares between our relationship with each other and our relationship with God.