All right. I've got an email hot off the press here. I apologize for my voice. I'm very sick at the moment. Um, but I read this email and, and a girl who's been corresponding with me for some time and she has a good heart and I want to make sure to give her the answer to this and I, I am doing it this
way because I, I feel like there are other people who would benefit from this information. So I'm going to obviously anonymize a bit because she give me, gives me some details about a family situation. But mm, the, the story is that there's someone who's close to her who has made choices over the course
of her life that are consistently poor and they're in ways that she definitely knows better. And this pattern has led her to a place where she's dependent on other people for her livelihood. And then she uses that, that grace, not just to continue to make poor choices, but also to be idle and not do
anything with her life except bad things. So, and she's sort of passed these habits down to her kids now and So the questions are, and I, I mean, I wish the details weren't, weren't so particular because it would be really good to read you the email. But um recently she, she had an interaction with this
person and she felt, she says, disgusted, irritated and angry and she caught herself feeling this way and, you know, this is someone she's known for a very long time and helped for a very long time. And so she asks, is it sinful to feel this way? And when she sees people in situations where they're harming
themselves like this, and there are situations very clearly their own choice, just defiantly persistent. Is it, is it sinful to feel this way? Should we be bothered by it? And then more importantly, she asks, how can we actually help these people? Are you hurting them by helping them? These are wonderful
questions they really are. So I wanna start with a story in my own confession about my own mistake inadequacy. So many years ago, some of, you know, um I had an opportunity to go to certain parts of Africa to open them for a charity that was focused on treating malnutrition in Children. They had begged
me for some time, they couldn't find anyone to go. And that I had, I had joined up with that charity for technical advice and just to help in any way I could. And at the time I was a, I was a grad student I was also in the National Guard. I had a young family, lots of stuff going on. But one thing I
didn't have was money. And so I said if there's anything else I can do, and so they put me on their board and I'd go to the meetings and help out. I wrote him a cool little program to write receipts, uh, automatically so they could send those out to the donors because everyone was a volunteer at that
time, uh, which was great. So they begged me to go to Africa. My wife is from South Africa and they said, please, can you go? We don't have anybody who can go. We don't have anybody who wants to go. Can you go? And I said, I don't have any time and I don't have any money. And so long story short, God
provided a way and a very kind gentleman provided a way so that the financial obstacle disappeared. And I said, well, I guess I gotta go. If, if someone can put up that money, I can find a way to make the time. So I arranged a leave of absence from school and, and, uh, work and everything and packed
up the family and went to Africa for three weeks. I think we went. And so, uh, I traveled halfway across, but not halfway all the way across the world and there was some danger involved in where I was going. Uh, I didn't bring my family with me, they, my wife just went off to where her family is from
, visit her parents and stuff. And so I went, uh, through all of Zimbabwe. I went to Mozambique and, um, it was rugged at times. It was just traveling by, by car and bus. The, at one point the, the, so since the says the white farmers got booted out of Zimbabwe, everything's gone to hell. And one of
the things is that the, the, the land isn't kept up and the fences aren't mended and, and like the whole country is just farmland. Most of it's fallow now. But there are still cattle, emaciated, cattle, the people and the cattle are emaciated, but the, the cattle wander onto the highway because there
are no fences anymore. And on a regular basis, buses are hitting these, these cows and a lot of people die. And so everyone had told me, hey, I mean, in country, everyone had told me how, how are you getting around? I said, well, we just got to take the bus and they're like, you're nuts doing an overnight
bus, you're gonna get killed and I thought they were exaggerating. But then we almost hit a cow and the bus driver was just a ninja driving that bus and he swerved around. So you can imagine a full size bus up on two wheels. That's what happened. So the bus almost flipped and we were driving down the
highway speeds and I was very grateful for the Lord's protection. So we had a shoe shoestring budget. I was with my brother in law. He was kind enough to go with me. So I wasn't alone and we, we just had barely enough to get some food and stay in some really lousy places. And I remember, um, having this
moment where I, I kind of snapped and what had happened was, you know, we had screened maybe 3000 kids just back to back to back. We were weighing and measuring kids or driving or sleeping the whole trip, right. It was just back to back to back because I didn't have any time. So we just had to get it
knocked out and we had coordinate ahead of time with some people there to try to arrange for everyone to be where they needed to be. We're using L DS chapels to it's the set up space to do this in and we were coming out of one of these events and uh a pair of ladies were walking up just sauntering very
slowly and well, there's another part of this story. I'm sorry if this sounds long winded, I hope it's, you'll see the relevance. This one place we showed up. They had this enormous mango tree on the church property and when they opened the gates there, there was a huge crowd already and they all came
in, they had to stand in line and come into the building and we'd weigh and measure them and then send them out. We were gathering statistics. That's what we were doing and names and, and then, you know, if, if they were malnourished, they'd get into the program. That was the idea. So, when we came out
of the building that evening, we're all done and we had seen hundreds of kids, the entire property was trashed. I mean, there was trash everywhere in the mango tree. The mangoes were not ripe. You could see it just by looking at the tree, the mangoes were not ripe. The mango tree was trash and the property
was littered with mangoes that were green that had one bite taken out of them. And then they've been thrown away. And I thought to myself, these people came here for help and they've trashed the grounds and they've taken these fruits that would have eventually been decent to eat and they've ruined them
, got nothing out of them. And then the watershed moment that I started describing before is we came out of this event and it's emotionally trying. I felt like every one of those kids was my kid. You know, I had kids that age and they were hungry, they were starving and you could see it just by looking
at them, a lot of them had hernias in their stomachs. They uh their belly buttons were sticking out and the lack of concern for these kids by their parents. It was getting to me and I don't mean because they weren't being fed because they were poor. That's not what I'm saying. A lot of the parents in
some parts of Africa, which is a continent, not a country, they see their kids more like animals would than humans would. And it bothers me because I feel like those kids are my kids. And so you go through hundreds and knowing the statistics, a significant percentage of the Children that you physically
lift to put them on the scale, they're gonna die, they're going to die and it's completely preventable. So we were packing up to go and uh these two ladies come sauntering up and I snapped and I turned to them and I said you couldn't even be bothered to show up on time. You expect us to just set this
all up again just for you. I was so mad. All of those kids were just in my mind screaming at me for help. And here's the problem right in front of us. Thankfully, the district president, a beautiful man who is standing beside me. He immediately turn to me just beaming with light and he said we could
do one more, right? We could just do one more. It only take a minute, we could do one more. And I felt so ashamed, I felt so ashamed when we talk about helping people. There is so much more to it. Then the cookie cutter, uh what do you call that stuff? Fondant, you know, the fake cake covering. There's
so much, that's how we talk about. Charity. Charity is a visceral thing. If you're a nurse, you know what this is like, you know, changing bedpans. I've never been a nurse, but I've had a lot of sewage problems in my house at the various places I've lived in and so I've had my share of being exposed
to terrible things that in that regard, bodily fluids stuff. And I've had to do first aid stitching people and things. Not people. Have I done people yet just myself but animals anyway, it's visceral like that. Charity is visceral like bodily fluids, helping people. It's so much more like helping elderly
people who are on their way out of life and babies than it is helping fellow humans, adults functioning independent people. And so much can be said about this and needs to be said about this. But to try to keep this as brief as I can make it on 11 take. Is it sinful to feel disgusted, irritated and angry
? Yes and no. Is it wrong to feel those things? No. When someone intentionally does less than the best, they know they are absolutely guilty and justice, justice creates the justification for feeling this way about that and all the more. So when you're the one paying the price, when you're the one who's
sweating for like six hours trying to smuggle scales through customs in Zimbabwe. And God gives you a miracle because the security guards in charge of checking bags just disappeared for five minutes. Who knows why? And you walk right through because you don't have even a dollar to bribe them, you know
, and almost getting killed by a cow on a bus and, and then you're there and these two ladies, they can't even be bothered to show up to the place where other people are gonna solve all your problems that you could have solved yourself? But wouldn't. But is it a sin in another way? Yes, because the higher
thing to do. So the lady who wrote the email, she said um the title of the email is how can God help those that won't help themselves? Here's your answer. He sends you. That's hell because he can't because of his justice. So what he does is he sends people that he is forgiven so that they love these
people in ways that his justice will not allow him to do directly. That's your answer. Now, that being said, again, getting away from the cookie cutter because we just oversimplify this. It's not as easy as to say, just be uh just give everyone what they ask. There's a huge difference between helping
someone and reducing their short term suffering to help someone. It's a question of improvement, alleviating short term suffering is just palliative care. And again, nurses, you understand all about this, curing someone or improving their condition is one thing and you might invest an awful lot in trying
to help them that way. If someone's terminal, you juice them up with morphine until they're dead. Right. You have to know the difference when you're helping people and you have to prioritize your limited resources. Now, some people are made all the worse. A lot, a lot of people, especially in the United
States are made much worse because of help in Africa. Things are so much worse across Africa because of international aid. It decimates local economies. You know, people send all their clothes over there because they're like, well, if people don't have clothes, I'll just send them clothes. Well, what
happens is local people get their hands on that and then they sell them to other people. And so people who make clothes locally cannot compete with free. And so then they go out of business and now you've got this cascading cycle of poverty because someone wanted to help. Same thing with food aid. You
send a bunch of free food over there. And what happens is one it's corrupt is all get out. And so the wrong people take hold of the food and then they either give it to their rich friends, their relatives or they sell it. So the the aid that comes in puts farmers out of business and so people can't get
honest work and then it's going to all the wrong people furthermore if you feed a bunch of people that don't have enough food, do you know what happens? They make more people that can't be fed. And these are things that when your broad brushing of help is help, help is just giving people what they're
asking for. No. And this is why the definition of love is so important. Love is suffering for the benefit of another person. Now, that's umbrella that includes alleviating suffering and actually improving their situation. But you have to break those apart and make a distinction. Alleviation of suffering
is good. But when you do that, for people who would benefit from that suffering, it's evil, it's evil to mediate consequences that help people be better that help people become better. Now, the specific story I can't go into but just for the benefit of this gal. In this case, the f the close person that
she was talking about was made into this, she was enabled by people that were helping and now having lived her life this way, she's in a permanent condition where it can't really be reversed. She's too old and et cetera, there are situations that can't be reversed. So now the only choice is palliative
care or nothing. Now that now we get back to is it a sin to be angry? You can actually dissolve this whole situation by understanding the difference between palliative care and actual improvement. Because if you're in it for palliative care and you know it, you're not going to be angry or upset about
dumping it into a black hole, which is basically what you're doing because you will only earmark those resources knowing full well. That's what they're going to the upset, angry, whatever it comes when you're expecting improvement in a palliative situation. Does that make sense? Now, there's one other
thing that I have to apologize for being so brief about that, I'm just hitting the heads of many things that need a lot more content to fully explain. There's a difference between giving up and giving down. There's a difference between giving up and giving down. So what we were just talking about with
the distinction between improvement and palliative care. That's a, a split in giving down, giving down splits into palliative care or improvement. If you're giving palliative care, it could be the case that money is an appropriate means if it's improvement and you're giving down money is almost never
the best way to do it. This is a huge mistake that we make. This is a uh a way we could be way better than we are. Sorry, I'm using my tissues as a boost for my camera. So I don't look like I'm 100 ft tall. I switched out my chair but I need to blow my nose because I have a cold and I'm dying here. Sorry
, the microphone probably picked all all the sick detail of that, but maybe it's just an object lesson because we're talking about how visceral charity is. All right now, I'm clear. So when you're giving down, is this the case in this situation? Is the case when I went to Africa, it's most charity is
like this you're giving down. If what you want to do is help the person nine times out of 10. If not more often, they don't need money, they need information, they need an example, They need reasons, they need opportunity and they need all those things way more than they need money. So going back in
time with the person that the the emailing lady is talking about. If you could do everything over again, the thing would be to go back to the, the event that kicked all this off and instead of doing what people did to help, actually, what this lady needed was a nice loving kick in the pants to say, get
over yourself and get back on the horse. And so often we want to say something that we think is comforting instead of get over it and get back on the horse and what we're actually doing is hurting them. And some, sometimes what's needed is opportunity. Like if you have just to pluck something out of
thin air, if you've got a recent single mother for whatever reason and she can't earn enough to support her child or Children. And let's say you're a family member and you wanna help out money is not the answer. This is a giving down situation. She needs an opportunity to go up. And so maybe what you
offer is babysitting, but it has to be attached to opportunities for improvement. If she says, look, here's my plan to get out of this hole and it's a good plan and she's like, all I need is a babysitter. Fantastic. If it's, I need a babysitter because I can't take care of my kid and I don't have a plan
, but I'm just gonna do whatever and that's not good, that's good. And giving money is even worse, right? So um yeah, there's a lot more that could be said about that giving up is a different story giving up. So giving down is almost always the case that what's needed is not money, it's information,
opportunity, belief giving up. It's almost always the case that what's needed is money. And the reason is that when you're giving down, the whole reason the problem exists is because that person is lower in the hierarchy than you. And I know these phrases are extraordinarily offensive to people. We need
to get over it because there's no other way to describe it that I can think of reality is a pyramid. It's a hierarchy and this is true. We, we can't go into all the details, but I could take you all over psychology history. We could go in any direction and I'll show it to you. Uh But one of these properties
is that if you have a problem, you're gonna think that the solution is around you at the peer level. It's not, it's always above you always. Now we can phrase this in ways that are less offensive, but also aren't as clear. Like all good things come from above and everybody in the pews will say, yeah
. Ok. That's good. I, I'm not tripping any wires. But if I were to tell you, if you have a problem, your solution will not be found in you or your peers, it will come from above as in a person that's better than you. Everyone would lose their minds and, and there's some valid justification for that like
you might say, but I have good ideas all the time that come for me. No, actually, it's just the ministry of unseen angels thing. All good comes from above. It all comes from the throne of God trickling down like an infinite number of waterfalls. He's good enough to do an awful lot of it invisibly. But
if you're stuck with this false idea that it comes from peers, you cut yourself off from the, the best parts that the greater portion of what he could do for you. So anyway, I've talked about this before. You don't bring blessings down from the mountain like Aaron tried to do. You call people up to the
mountain like Moses tried to do. And so when you're trying to help people. It's never about giving what you have because you're higher in the mountain to them. It's always about calling them up to where you are or calling them to the tree of life. If you want to use the Lehigh example, you don't pluck
the fruits off the tree and then walk down the river all gingerly like, hey guys, I got this for you. So you don't have to go up there. That's the only place the fruit is available. They can't be carted down the river. And so what do you take down the river or down the mountain just enough to entice
them up? You give them some free loaves and fishes and say, don't you wanna be like me? That's what Jesus did. He gave them free loaves and fishes and said, don't you want to be like me? And they're like, no, we're good. It says that they were super offended and they, a lot of people left for that point
. So, um how does you uh yeah, anyway, so you want them to improve and come up to a higher level. So if, if you're trying to help a sibling, let's say, and you're in a place where you have the wisdom, material resources, whatever, even if all they need is a car and you happen to have a car and they don't
, don't think the problem is the car. The problem is not the car. The problem is never the problem ever it's something bigger than that. The problem is always just the symptom of the real problem. You have to dig and say, why doesn't my sibling have a car? Hm. And that one's real easy because you can
trace back in life and see where one person went one way and one person went the other. That's the problem. And so to really help them is not to give them a car. You know why? Because when you give a kid a five gallon can of gas, they're not gonna invent the internal combustion engine, build a tractor
and start making a high rise building. They're gonna do something in gasoline and light it and probably blow up themselves. And other people, you have to get them to the place where either giving them gas is a good idea because you've been trained and you know, safety, you know what it's used for. You
have access to engines or you get them to the place where they don't even need your dang gas because they can get their own. You see when we get into the visceral ness of this, the changing bedpans level of charity, you have to roll up your sleeves and actually spend time with people. It turns out it
turns out if you want to help people in Africa, probably the only way is to go to Africa because you can't import them. It's not legal, right? You got to be around them. You have to be around people to really help them. Because what they need is opportunity and information and motivation. OK. Giving
up. How is that different? Not giving up? Like I give up, but we're talking about giving down, giving up. When you're giving up, you're helping someone higher in the hierarchy than you. Well, why do they need any help? Open your scriptures? The answers are in the manual. Why did Elijah need help from
the widow? Why did Elisha need help from the lady who was married? They were prophets of God. Why did Elisha need a place to stay? Why did Elijah need food? I mean, right before that God was feeding him with Ravens. The answer is, it's not about the person and what they need. It's about giving opportunity
to the people below to participate in something that is far better than anything they could do themselves. You see it's very different. Ok? But I don't wanna get too much into that. I just mentioned it because I mentioned it. I don't want to leave you with just a little tidbit. That's enough of a bite
. So hopefully that helps. Um charity is a really sophisticated thing. It's not as simple as we've been led to believe. So to make sure that we've answered the questions, what is it? She says, what is it about myself that I need to change, split palliative care and improvement apart. The person that
you're talking about is not going to improve. If you pulled back, it doesn't matter what you did, you could withhold all the assistance you've been giving this time. You could go Chuck Norris on her. It doesn't matter, she's not going to change, she's going to die this way. And so now your question is
, do I let her die sooner in greater misery by pulling out all my assistance and reallocating it to something that's gonna do more good? Or do I continue feeding the beast and reducing her suffering? Even though it's deserved. You have to decide that, uh, in my own life, I've had many, many, many, many
situations where I, um, uh, gas engines like lawnmowers and stuff, they usually have a fuel shut off valve. So when you're closing things down for the winter, you can drain out that fuel line. So it doesn't get gunked up. I've had many situations where I've shut that, that thing off and it's because
I had other things I had to reallocate it to and I've had situations where I turn it down a bit and I've had situations where I leave it and you, you have to think about the priorities and what else, the money or time or whatever you're spending might be used on because it is a finite system. You only
have so much to give and you are responsible for how you allocate it, but it's not so clean as saying, well, let's just say the issue is money well, I know this young man that's, that's done all the right things in his life and he just doesn't have any capital and if he could come up with $100,000 he
could open up a mechanic shop and employ 20 people and just would be on his way and I'd probably get the money back as well. It's just a win all around. You have to weigh that and see what's more important and it's complicated because is there someone else who could jump in and help that young man or
who would, is there anyone else that would help the selfish person that's sucking up all the help from everybody? But just wasting it, you have to decide that. But I'll tell you, there's a reason that I no longer donate any money to causes in Africa, right? So you go through things and you learn things
and then you have to continuously update your model to answer the question. What's the best that I can do? What's the greatest benefit I can do in the world? And, and it's not enough to say, oh, someone's suffering and I'm reducing that because half the time in reducing it, you're actually increasing
it. I have a video that is not set to be published for a long time because it's not particularly urgent. And it's on the question of is it always a good thing to spare someone's life that's fun to look forward to. So mark that on your calendar. It's a heavy question and if it might seem to be ridiculous
, but it, you know, that video was made for a specific person in a specific situation and it's quite an advanced lesson. But if you're in the path towards God, it's one you're going to have to think about sooner than you think. So. That's probably a good place to cut it off. I praise Jesus for giving
me the voice to say this. I've actually uh my voice has been lost most of the day and uh now I'm probably gonna go collapse somewhere. So I hope this was helpful. Thank you for the email and thank you for your faith in God and your heart that you constantly and freely give to others. Um It is a treat
when people reach out to me and the Lord blesses me with a uh the briefest exposure of the love that he has for people whose hearts are in the right place. So thank you.