Charity begins at home,

But it doesn’t end there.

True story:

In Galveston, the congregation I served began a relationship with a clinic and community in eastern, very rural and very poor Nicaragua.

Each year, we sent two large medical delegations to the clinic for 10 days each. They taught health care workers, held clinic, saw thousands of patients and gave many Texas medical students a rare and intensive experience in treating tropical diseases.

It was expensive- lots cheaper than treating those patients in a US hospital to be sure, but the Nicaragua trips took up a sizeable portion of our congregation’s mission committee budget.

Which prompted a handful of people in the congregation to begin saying similar things to what you just said- “Why are we helping people in Nicaragua when we have hungry people here in Galveston. After all, charity begins at home!”

They had a point, agreed the mission committe, so the church forged a relationship with the local Salvation Army, which had been forced by budget cuts to eliminate the nightly meal it served to the homeless. We pulled tother four other local congregations and each of the congregations agreed to buy the food, prepare and serve one meal per week.

Or congregation picked Mondays and we formed 5 “meal teams”- one for each Monday of the month with an extra team for those months that had a fifth Monday. Each team had 8-10 people. Some on the team bought the food. Others prepared food for 50-60 people, served the food and then cleaned up the Salvation Army kitchen. I was the dishwasher on meal team #2.

It was a heavy commitment of time and treasure. We had about 50 church volunteers who participated.

But here’s the funny thing- or the sad thing, depending on your perspective…..

Not a one of those 50 volunteers were from the group of folks who had complained about our Nicaragua mission, saying “charity begins at home”. Nope. When it came time to put their money where their mouths were, they were AWOL.