On the first Sunday of every month, our church takes up a second offering for the food pantry. My wife keeps the sign-up sheet for stocking the shelves. I carry the boxes. I have done it long enough that I know which cans go on which shelf without looking, and I count it among the best hours of my month.
I begin there because I want to be clear that I believe in helping people. Scripture is plain about it. The apostle tells us to give cheerfully, as each of us has decided in his own heart, and not under compulsion. I have always loved that verse. It puts the decision where it belongs, with a man and his Maker, and keeps everybody else out of it.
That is why I get uneasy when people say charity is not enough and the state ought to step in. Texas has the highest share of residents without health insurance of any state, and every so often someone writes to tell me that a church pantry cannot fix that. I suppose it cannot. But I notice that the remedies they propose always involve compulsion. A tax is not a gift. You cannot give cheerfully what is taken from you.
I would go a step further, and I have thought about it a good while. If every need were met, what would be left for the faithful to do? A family that never goes hungry never meets the women from our pantry. A man who has a doctor never has his church pass the plate for his surgery. Something is lost when nobody needs us. I would not want to take from a single believer the chance to be generous.
People like to bring up the Good Samaritan. It is a beautiful story, and I notice what it actually shows. A private man, on his own road, with his own money, bound up the wounds, paid the innkeeper and went on his way. There was no program. There was no committee. Nobody passed a law. I have always thought that was the point of it.
There are other passages people send me, about the hungry and the thirsty and the stranger, and what was done for the least of these. I read them, and I am moved by them, and I put them where I believe they belong, in the private conscience of each believer. Faith is a personal matter. I have never believed it was meant to tell a government what to do. Only me, and only on Sundays when I am listening.
So I will keep carrying the boxes. On the first Sunday of the month, I will put the cans on the shelf where they go. By the second week the shelves are usually bare again, and I take that as a sign of how much good we are doing. And I will vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall, because I would like the shelves to keep needing us. My impression is that the other side would like fewer Texans to need the pantry at all, and I have said what I think is lost when nobody needs us.
The poor will always be with us. I find I have stopped hoping otherwise.
D. M.