When You Don't Want To Help

When You Don’t Want To Help

We’re not saints.

Well OK maybe YOU are a saint but I certainly am not.

So I’m not a saint, that means practicing what I preach is hard. It means my mind comes up with excuses not to do the things my mind also tells me I must do. “It’s hard. It’s expensive. I’m tired. It’ll offend someone. I’ll be embarrassed. It’s annoying.”

I’m sure you know the list. I’m sure many of you go through it regularly too.

So the picture attached to this blog, if you can see it, is from the Ghibli movie “Spirited away”. I’m not going to go into the details about the plot, it’s worth seeing if you haven’t but a large part of it is this.

-Sometimes the people who most need help are the people hardest too help-

And let me say this first. Don’t be a doormat. There is a difference between helping someone who doesn’t know how to ask for help and letting someone abuse your good will.

However.

I have found that quite often people most need my help when I feel least capable of helping them. And sometimes it’s utterly unavoidable. If they need $10,000 and my bank account is hovering around zero I can’t do anything. But mostly I’m just tired, I’m having a bad day. I’m looking for an excuse.

“Excuses don’t help anyone, least of all you.”

So I suck it up. I take a deep breath and I consider. If my day is bad how bad is their day that they need me on a bad day?

And, ya know, helping people helps me feel better so there’s that too.

But mostly it’s about not being selfish. And remembering that Life happens as it will, not as you want. That this person reaching out to me now is doing so now because now is when they need me. If now is when I am needed, then now is when I must act.

Too many “nows” in that paragraph.

I’m not asking you to be saints, I will not ask of you what I will not ask of myself. I simply ask that you consider. If when you are tasked to aid someone in need and you start going through that checklist of reasons put at the end. “If now is when I am needed is now when I must act?”

I can’t answer that for you, no one can. The answer may be no, but the question must be answered.

Until next time my dear readers.

Thank you and God Bless;

~ S. Wallace