Much Obliged
Category: Thinking Allowed...
Posted Tuesday, May 23, 2006 at 05:36 PM [GMT-6]

Got a lull in the action -- I know, I'll blog!

I spent a couple of hours this morning at church, conducting interviews of people wanting financial assistance for luxury items like electricity and gas bills. We did what we could with the $1K that was allotted to us for the day. If we'd known that the woman asking for a big rent check was going to be a no-show (how does that happen?), we could have been more help to a couple of folks. As it was, we had to send them along to other agencies to seek the balance of what they needed to make it through another month.

I went from there to the Petroleum Club, where I sat in a leather armchair, was attended to by a bevy of waiters with thick accents, and dined on poblano cheese soup and chicken salad chile rellenos, in the company of bank presidents, oil company executives, and gentlemen ranchers who spend more for gasoline in a month than most of those above-mentioned folks spend for housing.

What's wrong with this picture?

Well, not a thing, in my humble opinion. Don't get me wrong -- the contrast was thought-provoking, and even sobering. But I don't think it requires much more response than to consider (1) my own blessings and (2) whether I'm being a good steward of them. It certainly didn't cause me to question whether those aforementioned swells (I'm not a member of the Petroleum Club, by the way, but my Durango does use its share of gasoline) would be judged harshly for being so prosperous while others weren't. In fact, I happened to know that some of those folks also give away more of their money than some of us make in a year.

In fact, the purpose of that lunch was to discuss with a client a new program by which people can set up permanent endowments to benefit our community by providing funds for things like scholarships, assistance to the disabled, and capital for the expansion of social services.

So, the surroundings may change, and the approach may be more, well, peripheral, but benevolence comes in many shapes and from many directions. Whether any of us are doing all that we should be doing is something that's between us and our Creator, and with a sincere question of "are we doing what we need to be doing?" we're probably on our way to assuring that, indeed, we are.