The Day I QUIT Causes

Today is the day I stopped believing in “causes”- the fights against symptoms.

We raise banners to end hunger, poverty, homelessness, racism, trafficking, diseases,...

And absolutely YES, I belive that we DO need specified solutions. We need to pin point problems and work to find solutions.

But sometimes I think we work at things completely and 100% backwards.

Are we just reacting to the attacks rather than working to CREATE futures?

Look at our worlds' campaigns...anti-human trafficking efforts, for example. They are GREAT for solving the urgent situations and for that I am a fan. But WITH that we can't forget that the second we save one girl from her situation, another one comes right behind her that we need to rescue from the exact same situation.

Meanwhile, the big picture begs us to look at it. Why don’t we begin to think a little farther out? Let's work to find how to help construct healthy people, healthy families, thus healthy cultures and civilizations.

I just think that all of this devotion to “fighting for a cause” is backwards. That’s a reaction, that’s devoting our life to be spent on DEFENSE. When maybe we are underestimating the strength God wants us to take on…maybe it’s our turn to play offense.

Take Children’s Cup for example, an organization that looks at the ENTIRE picture of a life. Starting at childhood, no matter what the situation is, they are there to bring health and sustain it in a child’s life. Starting with food, water, medical care, education, and mostly, the HOPE of Jesus.

Next theyreach out to the families of these children, providing a church family, and people focused on enriching entire families.

From there opportunities are offered and a covering for children to GROW up in the paths God has made for them. Any way they turn, they have the light of Hope there waiting.

See, the strategy isn’t to end human trafficking or eliminate hunger or cure AIDS. No, the strategy is to help create healthy families starting at day one.

I just think if we re-routed our efforts from all of this cause fighting into serving people with a holistic vision, we would see transformation beyond anything we can imagine.

The problem today is that people just want to exercise passion, to make a difference now, and essentially we want to be HEROES. I’m guilty of it. There’s a selfish ambition in each of us that just wants a cool story to tell, a little bit of glory, self satisfaction. And even sometimes our motives are completely pure. We just want to do the right thing by helping create solutions to the pain we see.

But focusing on peoples’ problems is dangerous. Diagnosing people can imprison them in a box they weren’t meant for. To reduce pain to a common issue is dangerous.

When we put people in boxes, dividing them according to the “problems” they have, we reduce them to statistics and suck ourselves of the pure compassion we were meant to have.

When a solution to the problem becomes more important to us than a healthy person, we’ve become lazy and selfish. Because we can blow up our list of “victories” but the ones who suffer are the people, who now have one problem solved only to jump to another. If peoples’ hearts aren’t healthy, they can’t fully heal from any problem. No matter how hard we work.

I just think causes are dangerous. Loving people is all we can do. Where did we become so arrogant to think that we know how to fix problems for people with checklisted solutions? No one has the same life, no one has the same story, no one has the same context. Each person deserves the time of day to not get thrown into what we think is a cycle of Hope, but really we are just holding them one foot back from a freedom uniquely designed for them by God.

The truth is, fighting causes is easier. The truth is, it takes a heck of a lot more time to love people than it does to “fix” them. The truth is, individuals and statistics are 100% different. And we can’t afford to replace “persons” with “percentages”. People have lives. People have worlds.

We’ve got it so wrong when we think that the problem is that people are victims of this world and it’s our job to save them.

It’s our job to help them discover the world God created just for them and to teach them to fight for it themselves.

Freedom is unique. It can’t be given away in masses. It’s intricate. It fits people differently.

We can’t possibly think one-size-fits-all and dismiss it as such.

The cycle of Hope takes depth and attention and individual love. Just as Jesus never gave us exact answers to each problem, He taught us to think and reason and seek God’s voice. Where did we get off thinking our fashion of helping others could work otherwise?