Our Five Dollar Offering

As I think about some of the major humanitarian problems in the world there is a temptation to become apathetic knowing that I can do very little to help.  With the enormous magnitude of the refugee crisis with on the order of 65 million refugees in the world, the terrible devastation in Haiti and other places with likely thousands who have died from Hurricane Matthew, and continuous worldwide hunger problems that plague an estimated 13% of the earth’s population, I’m certain that there is nothing I can do that will make a measurable impact on global statistics like these.  When I think of any offering I might give, I’m led to ask along with Andrew when the Lord wanted to feed the numberless multitude with a little bread and fish, “But what [is this] among so many?” (John 6:9) 

                A while back Elder Holland spoke about helping the poor and he said this about Mother Teresa: “A journalist once questioned Mother Teresa of Calcutta about her hopeless task of rescuing the destitute in that city. He said that, statistically speaking, she was accomplishing absolutely nothing. This remarkable little woman shot back that her work was about love, not statistics. Notwithstanding the staggering number beyond her reach, she said she could keep the commandment to love God and her neighbor by serving those within her reach with whatever resources she had.  ‘What we do is nothing but a drop in the ocean,’ she would say on another occasion. ‘But if we didn’t do it, the ocean would be one drop less [than it is].’”  The message of Elder Holland in this was that we must do what we can to help others, whatever it is that may mean.  The Lord told us, “Ye have the poor with you always,” and so I guess it would be a doomed mission from the start if we set out to end poverty completely (Mark 14:7).  But we can help one person and add one drop to the ocean.  And we must do something, or, according to Amulek, we have denied the faith: “If ye turn away the needy, and the naked, and visit not the sick and afflicted, and impart of your substance, if ye have, to those who stand in need—I say unto you, if ye do not any of these things, behold, your prayer is vain, and availeth you nothing, and ye are as hypocrites who do deny the faith” (Alma 34:28).  Our mandate is not to solve the world’s problems; it is simply to “impart of [our] substance… to those who stand in need.”  We may not make any statistical difference to major problems, but if we believe Amulek we know that giving will at least keep ourselves from losing our faith. 
                I think this story told by a young man about the Prophet Joseph helps put in perspective what we can do: “I was at Joseph’s house; he was there, and several men were sitting on the fence. Joseph came out and spoke to us all. Pretty soon a man came up and said that a poor brother who lived out some distance from town had had his house burned down the night before. Nearly all of the men said they felt sorry for the man. Joseph put his hand in his pocket, took out five dollars and said, ‘I feel sorry for this brother to the amount of five dollars; how much do you all feel sorry?’”  Joseph surely didn’t have the financial means to rebuild alone that man’s house, but that didn’t stop him from giving something.  I guess that’s the kind of attitude we should have as we continue to see suffering around the world: we cannot fix the problem, but instead of becoming indifferent surely we can give our own humble five dollars to help.