Face-to-Face

            I understand that your life is busy. I understand that you’re juggling a lot in your life with school and friends and trying to get a few hours of sleep, and that there may not even be that many service projects that you can become a part of and truly feel involved in. It’s impossible for us to personally support every single humanitarian project. But if you do get an opportunity to take a direct service project, and have face-to-face contact with the people you are helping, I would encourage you to take it. It can make a difference in your life in a way that providing money might not be able to.

            When you go and you help someone, the whole dynamic of the relationship changes. When you’re just donating money, the people that you are helping are just facts and figures, a sad statistic in a far away place. But when you actually give your time, and spend time with the people you want to help, you start to see faces. You start to hear stories. It’s impossible to think of these people as statistics anymore – they’re human beings, intelligent and emotional and just like you or me. And that’s a lot harder to put away in the back of your head until the next time you decide to donate money. My point is, it’s easy to get caught up in our own lives, but we’ve been called to help the world, and direct service is a way that this helpfulness is an actual relationship rather than a checkmark on our “good person” to-do list.