Are We Helping or Hurting?

This is the question we’ve found ourselves pondering on a lot these days.  You give to the elderly woman only to have her staring back at you with a dissatisfied look on her face as if to say “that’s not enough”.  You buy sandwiches for the pregnant women and children after they tell you that their hungry and ask you for food and they still look at you with the same hopeless eyes...wanting, needing more.   We try to do what is right but we are left wondering what is even right.  We would never want to be part of the reason for their constant return to the streets because that is where they get their needs met but to drive on past a hungry child who is asking for food feels wrong too. We try to do the right thing but we still leave with an empty feeling inside and they are still left in desperate need. That constant look of desperation reminds me of the scripture from Matthew 4:4 “Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”.  So yes, we should expect that they will return that look of desperation to us even after we buy them all that their stomach’s can hold.  And yet I’m left wondering,  “How can we help them to see what their greatest need is in such a situation?  And where do we even start?  We help one and 10 more come running to your door. Somewhere in the midst of such desperate need we need to find a peace in knowing that we can’t help them all but we need to be extra sensitive to the prompting of the spirit in order to know those that we can.  I am constantly reminded of the little boy who came upon the thousands of starfish that were washed upon the shore.  He knew that they would surely die if they were left on the shore and yet the fact that he could never save them all didn’t deter him from helping those he could.  It would be easy for a person to see a need that surpassed their ability and to turn away. Yet we need to always remember that everything that surpasses our ability is for the sake of depending on God so that He will be glorified and not man.