A helping hand ...

Thursday, Feb 9, 2012. Do you know people in your immediate environment who need help? There are various things, usually, where you can help others. Your friends are renovating their house. There are parents or kids who need support. A friend is in trouble with his next exam coming up. Someone is organising a big birthday party, … etc etc.

How to help best …

There are, of course, also the more severe cases where help is needed. A family needs support since both parents are working. Someone is dependent on alcohol and needs support, her whole life is not working out any more. There is a friend who has problems with money and needs support. How do we help best?

Helping people with addictions is a tricky thing. There are these standard mechanisms, where help makes things worse! Lets take Judy (name changed). She has her strategies to get from others what she wants. And people want to be helpful and provide help, food, time etc etc. Judy is dependent on alcohol and on particular pills. But all help does not work, it just makes the addiction worse. People invest their time, and at the end nothing is achieved!

We see these mechanisms of help everywhere, in international development aid as well as in the financial area. Help might not help, but worsen the problems! So we should be really smart and think twice before we provide some “easy” help. We need to help in a sustainable way and develop a strategy to heal the problems!

New Testament advice …

The New Testament has a lot of advice with respect to help. First, the whole life of Jesus is a big “helping mission” for mankind. It is a sustainable mission, it is a mission which provides an open source of forgiveness. His death and resurrection restore the relationship between God and mankind. In this sense, it was a hard mission for Jesus, but a mission which fully addresses the deep problems and fully resolves them.

The New Testament also provides a lot of help for us when we want to help each other. It asks us to help, but to help in a sustainable way. It aims to restore the relationships between humans. It wants truth. Jesus himself shows how he helps. He tells people: you are forgiven. But he also tells them: do not continue your wrong actions. Change them now.

The speeches of Jesus are full of kind words. But they are also full of warnings. God wants us to change bad behaviour. And we cannot expect that we get through with evil things. This is important: help needs to insist on behavioural changes! Help needs to be accompanied by consulting, by actions which restore full health. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts