by Jen Bishop

Created on: December 04, 2008

The two greatest in the Bible are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. With this in mind, I not only think it is a good idea to help and/or love your neightbor, but is something that is a calling of God. Loving your neighboring and offering them help out of the goodness of your heart is way for one to show the love of God to others without being too preachy.

I believe that this idea goes beyond the literal neighbor to the wor;d as out neighbor. In times like this the world is in need of help in any place that is can find that help. There are places all over the United States and the world that depend of people who are willing ti help all those around them in order to ge tthe job done. There are also places that telling people about the love og God is not the same as showing them the love of God.

Humanitarian Aide is a prime example of that. There have been a number of events in the last few years that have brought tragedy to a great man people. In these situations people needed help and not to preached to. They needed the Love of God shown to them rather than told to them. In the weeks and months after the tsunami and southern Asia, the last thing those people needed was to hear the way that God loved them. They needed to see Christians leave the comforts of thier home or stretch the amount of money that they had and do things to make a difference in the lives of those who were hurting and who had lost everything. Building a home, helping someone find lost family or adding support to the hurting was a much more effetive way of showing love than simply preaching to people about that love.

One of the greatest exampled of this is in Sudan. There are women and children there that have been raped and beaten and many have seen the men in thier lives die. They have traveled miles to tents that serve as refugee centers, after losing everything they had. They are hungry, thirsty, tired, alone and scared. The best thing that we can do to help the people in this situation is to given them bread and water and maybe help them feel safe where they must live now. There is very little hope to be spoken but it is easy to show the love of Christ by giving a hungry man food and a thirsty man water.

Helping your neighbor is part of your job as a Christian. It is not vital to help them if they can do it for themselves but to love and give and help those that need a hand up at the moment is one of the most Christ like ideas of our time.

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