I was reading a story today about a young girl who had posted a nasty letter about her parents on Facebook, and after finding it, her father posted a video response.  Obviously upset by both her criticism and her language, he read the letter she had written and responded to her allegations, then ended his response by shooting holes in her laptop computer with his pistol.  There were several responses to his video, some positive and some negative.  Two things were obvious to me as I listened to her letter and his response.  First, this was a family that had not been hit severely by the downturn in the economy; and second, in every segment of society there are people with what my husband calls “OPD”—Offensive Personality Disorder.  They say inappropriate things, they’re not grateful, they complain, they misuse what is given to them, they invade your space.  Poor people are no exception.  When you help the poor, it’s important to recognize this fact.  Not all of them will bow and thank you profusely for everything you do.  Some will, of course, but many will do something to offend. 

During conversations about helping the poor, I often hear people relating stories about their attempts to help someone  ending with some offensive behavior or language on the part of the person they tried to help.  Often it appears that the person’s desire to help the poor is diminished because the people they tried to help didn’t seem to appreciate it or they misused what was given them.  They just did not seem to deserve help.

This raises the question “How good do the poor have to be to deserve help?”

I tried to find some evidence in the Bible to help with that answer.  I read the passages where Jesus said to feed the hungry, but I couldn’t find any qualifications.  If a person is hungry, he needs food, period.  No offensive behavior changes that.  In fact, the stress of being hungry may actually make a person do or say things he/she otherwise might not do.  I have occasionally become irritated with the waitress because of the service when I was tired and hungry.  I would guess that’s also true of many of the poor we attempt to help, except I was probably an hour late for a meal, and they may be days late.  They are tired of being dependent upon others, tired of the stares, tired of the pity, tired of waiting in lines, tired of being told there is no job again today.  Then someone tries to help and they take out their frustration on the helper. 

Other issues regarding deserving help are how hard a person has tried to get work or how much he already has.  I often hear people talk about the fact that a person has a cell phone, he was brought to a soup kitchen in a nice car, he has a satellite dish in his yard, etc.  When we only know one thing about a person, it is often easy to make assumptions that are incorrect.  The best way to help people is to establish a relationship with them so that we can understand what real problems they may have, but if we are just giving out food we probably need to refrain from judgment on those we help.  They may look perfectly healthy to us because we can’t see the illness they have.  They may seem ungrateful and even angry at us, but we can’t see the condition of their hearts.

The fact is that fitting into our society is a major challenge for many of the poor in our country.  They just don’t have what it takes to succeed materially or socially.  But that does not mean they don’t deserve help.  Maybe the help they need is learning how to navigate in their society, or maybe it’s just a meal, but we should be careful of setting up artificial standards for them to meet in order to be worthy of our help.