I’ve got some confessing to do.  I’ve woken up this morning with a broken heart, and I can’t shake it because I’m not supposed to.

I am a selfish, lazy man.   I know the world is a big place, and that technological advances in communication make us aware of all kinds of problems local and global, and I know that I can’t fix everything, and I know that because of this, some form of emotional callousness should be expected and allowable.  I can’t exactly afford an emotional breakdown every time an earthquake happens in Haiti (sounds bad, I know, but Haiti is still a disaster after all the money we sent), and I can’t go wearing a green ribbon every time some Iranian gets bulldozed by their government.   There’s just too much going on, too much to do, people are too far away, and the world’s got too much to complain about.

But there’s another side to this human suffering that I’ve been ignoring altogether.  Some of us have the tendency to get overwhelmed with tragedies and just wave a white flag into the air, calling retreat.  It’s easy to feel like you can’t do anything when you’re one man–or, as I’m writing to you today, if you’re a very special lady I know (I’ll get to this in a sec).  I remember the last time I really did care, and I went to start a club for concerned Americans before the presidential elections in 2008.  I had lesson plans all laid out, ready to go; I talked to all the thinking men I knew, listed a series of problems we needed to fix, and set time aside for meetings.  Finally, when the time came, only two men showed up.  The next meeting, one man showed up.  The third meeting, nobody came.  Eventually, it was just me, sitting in my house, wondering why nobody else was interested in doing anything.  It was my first experience with social lethargy, and it left a mark on my heart.  To be sure, much of the reason I started the group was pride, but still–I was amazed that so many men who claimed to care wouldn’t even get together to talk about anything, and eventually, I’d find out they weren’t interested in attending political meetings run by actual political parties.

This same kind of thing happened to my wife this week, for a far more tragic reason.  She’s always been a very sweet-natured girl–almost the opposite of me–and has always been a giver.  If you’re a woman, she’s the lady you want planning your engagement party, because she’ll jump through hoops and spend her money to make sure that everything looks professional, and that you’re happy, and that you feel special.  She does this with absolutely everything.  If you’re sick, she’s begging her husband to make a visit to bring you food.  If you’re her husband, she’s trying, day after day, to make sure that you know you’re loved, not by just saying she loves you, but by taking care of your every need, all day, every day.  If you’re her mother, she’ll spend her days wondering whether you’ve met Jesus, and whether or not you’re going to go to heaven (just last week she experienced a relatively painful rejection from her mom for trying to evangelize).  I could talk for hours about this girl and the things she does for everyone she meets, because I see how she behaves all day, every day: this kind of charity and love is absolutely non-stop, to the point where people just expect it of her, unthankfully.

Now, the reason my heart is broken is because she’s taken a very serious venture, for something which is really important, and nobody has offered to help her–including me.  A few months ago, she decided to help pregnant, desperate women by joining a [1] pregnancy resource center.  This organization provides counseling and material help to any women who’ve become pregnant under terrible circumstances, women who are hurting and scared and have nowhere to turn, and are considering having abortions.  And she wants to be there for them, women whom she doesn’t even know, and babies whom she’ll probably never meet.  And although I did pledge $100 to her, I actually refused to attend her banquet because it was “too late” at night, from 7-9pm.  My own wife.

Sadly, I wasn’t alone.  While she is required to bring ten people to this banquet, not one person she asked even responded to her request, and this has brought her to a pretty low state, feeling a couple of things she hasn’t felt before.  First, she now feels that she has little ability to help the needy.  Second, that she’s acting completely alone.  One of the few people I’ve ever known who actually and truly cares for others has been abandoned herself.  And this breaks my heart, because I helped abandon her.

This isn’t the first time I’ve abandoned a helper, either.  There’s a man in my church named Carl, and this man has devoted immense amounts of time to helping the men in our church, serving and teaching incessantly.  His life was devoted to instructing and leading and caring, and he’s a great teacher, not just in an academic way, but also in the fact that he chose a career of ministering to the forgotten–men in prison, of all people.  To be honest, since I’ve been attending Evergreen Baptist Church, he’s been a foundational fixture, even getting to church at the crack of dawn on Saturday to make breakfast for the mens’ group (rumor has it, anyway, because I always work Saturday mornings).  On my wedding day, Carl even went on a several-hour trip so that he could attend, even though he’d only known me for a couple of weeks.

But Carl became very sick recently, for months now, and hasn’t even been able to stand up.  His ministry to the imprisoned, his very job, which paid him less than he deserves as a very well-educated man, has suffered so much that he had to resign.  The gap he’s left behind in our church is readily visible–multiple men have been called to fill his shoes, and those shoes aren’t exactly easy to fill, even when divided into more easily-tackled portions.  His wife asked me for prayer, I prayed maybe three times.  I haven’t visited this man–my own Christian brother–since he’s been sick.  I haven’t called him, or brought him a meal, or anything.  And now I can add my own wife to this list.

How can a man call himself a Christian when he doesn’t care for the needs of his own family?  How can I go on living this way, when my heart is so utterly obsessed with myself, that I’ve lost my ability to hurt with others? A man is a living shame when his own God sacrifices His own Son for him, and the man won’t even stay up an hour or two to help a desperate pregnant woman right down the street, or his suffering brother, or his constantly-loving wife.  No, a man who acts this way is less than a man, more like an animal concerned with only his own survival, of no serious use to his fellow man other than paid labor.

And this is precisely why I’ve written this letter: I desperately want to change, and stop being a useless, calloused man.  There are a couple of ways I can do this.  The first will be easy, the second difficult.

First, I want my brothers and sisters to recognize what we’ve done with Christmas–the celebration of our Lord’s entry into humankind, which He made solely to serve and suffer.  The idea that we can take Christ’s life and death so trivially, to turn it into a commercialized, empty consumerist nightmare in which people actually fight each other in grocery isles and children cry because they didn’t get what they wanted, is the most disgusting thing we could possibly do with His sacrifice aside from having drunken Christmas orgies.

A young man by the name of Derek once told me that his family spends their Christmas gift money on goods for suffering people, giving to charities instead of spending on themselves.  No Christmas stress, no perversions of Jesus’ name, charity as He would have wanted.  Why do we give our kids X-Boxes in Jesus’ name, when starving people live right down the street?  I’m not talking about giving your money to street-junkies: I’m talking about abandoned children, families with foreclosed homes, the guy who just lost his job, the pregnant lady who feels she has nowhere to turn but an abortion clinic.  If Christians give gifts to anyone on Christmas, why on earth do they give to people who don’t need anything?  I seem to remember a story about Jesus using violence to cleanse a temple of Yahweh-commercializers (Matthew 21:12-13).  Perhaps it’s time to notify our pastors so they can notify our churches of this problem, and start on a new track.  There is absolutely no reason Christ’s church should be getting materially wealthy on his day, when someone–perhaps even another Christian–is left shivering on the street in the middle of winter.

The second way to redeem my own behaviors is by taking the time, each and every day, to remember what Christ has done for me, to realize that everything good is a gift, and that I need to find some way to start living for Him and others instead of myself.  Is this going to be easy?  Of course not: it’s actually going to be very difficult.  But I’m not going to do it on my own, because I’m going to put it on my prayer list, and I’m going to pray every single day for Christ to make my heart hurt until I must give.   We know that people who ask God for stupid things probably aren’t going to get them, but we also know that when we pray in His will, we’re getting what we want.  We know because He promised us we would ([2] James 4:1-5).

So, I’ve got some reforming to do today, and I hope you join with me.  If you’d like to start by helping my wife take care of some destitute women, [3] please do.  And if you’d like to join in the Reclaiming Christmas movement, please do.  But whatever you choose to do, please–don’t do nothing.  Let’s not waste our lives playing video games and worrying about what kind of food we’ll eat: we’re not technologically-advanced socialpigs, we’re humans ([4] Matthew 6:25-34).  I can’t change the human race–certainly, we all know that not everybody is following Dear Leader Jeremy, but I do know one person I have influence over, and that person is me.  It’s time to get the heart I never had.

Heavenly father, I’m sorry for the man I’ve been, and I’m sick of being so selfish and useless.  Please forgive me for my innumerable failures, in which I ignored people I should have served.  I know you promised me that when two or more are gathered in your name, that you would hear our prayers and do what we ask ([5] Matthew 18:19-20).  I know others are praying this with me, so please give us hearts of charity this week–not because we want to feel good about ourselves–but because we’ve been given so much.  Help us to hurt with the hurting and pray for the downtrodden.  Give us the will to get off the couch and touch lives.  Help us to be beacons of light in a world full of selfishness and greed, and may our love make others see that Jesus Christ really does live within us.  Thank you for loving us despite ourselves.  In Jesus name, amen.

To donate to the Pregnancy Resource Center through my wife, [6] click here.

To visit the Pregnancy Resource Center’s webpage, and for information about their fundraising event, [7] click here.

And if you’re interested in reclaiming Christmas, attending a PRC banquet, or helping brother Carl, please contact me.