Merry Christmas?

I  have been "AWOL" from this blog for a while. My own mental health took a nose dive for a bit at Christmas. And in responding to a number of desperate needs in poor communities I connect with I have found myself in a rather desperate financial situation myself. Except mine is not hunger or a life and death medical emergency, or being trapped at night in a town alone with no money to get home. Mine is a planned trip to Kenya in February. So faced with needs so dire that I simply could not place as "unavailable" money I did not need until I leave on January 30, I gave to save a critically ill teenager and then to others to buy food, and then to another take time of work when she was terribly ill and so it went on, until now I have everything arranged for my trip to Kenya but no money to take with me, no money to pay for the trip itself. 

These kinds of decisions are where the rubber meets the road when, as those who are the beneficiaries of the terrible inequities of power and wealth in the world, we dare to befriend those who are its victims. Should I have made available the money I didn't need until February? Was this decision, or rather a whole series of decisions, wrong? Most of us build a secure wall around the things we consider our needs. What we need to face is that wall protects our privilege and that privilege stands in dire contrast to what others consider their needs. Once we take down that protective wall we can no longer hide behind it. We can no longer measure our "needs" with one ruler and others needs with a different one. We are faced with a call to live what we claim that every human being has the same dignity and worth as another.

When I first wrote this I believed all of these needs which I gave to were genuine.  As I edit this on 9 May 2025 I know that, while most of them turned out to be genuine, one or two right on Christmas were invented by a heartless con-artist who allowed me to put my trip in jeopardy to fill his own pocket. That, more than any other reason, is why we DO in fact need to create some kind of boundary between our needs and those of others or it is simply not safe for those who are wealthy to befriend those who are poor.