The silence on the other end of the phone was crushing. A desperate young mother, Nikalie Monroe, was out of formula for her hungry baby, and in a recent viral social experiment, she called the institutional Church for help. Over and over, the answer she heard was a bureaucratic, hardline “No.” Isn’t that a devastating indictment of our priorities? At the very moment the church was locking the door, we witnessed the beautiful contrast of a Pittsburgh father, AJ Owen, who simply partnered with his two young children to build a free food pantry in their front yard. No committee, no budget approval, no bureaucracy, just an immediate, personal “Yes” to the needs of his neighbors. Over 18 million people viewed his TikTok video and many started pantries of their own in the past two weeks. This contrast forces us to confront a vital question: Which example truly reflects the heart of the Father we claim to follow?
This tension between the “No” of the institution and the “Yes” of the individual is woven all through Scripture, proving this struggle isn’t new. 1 John 3:17 says, “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” Remember the priest and the Levite who walked on the opposite side of the road of the man who’d been beaten? It was the Samaritan who cared for the man. Jesus replied to the lawyer, “‘Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘You go and do likewise'” (Luke 10:36-37).
The challenge for us today is clear: Will we allow our systems to harden our hearts, leading us to say a collective “No” to the desperate pleas of our community? Or will we empower the individual, immediate, compassionate “Yes” right where we live? Our mission is simple: to see the person in need and care for them. The Apostle James reminds us, “If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” Let’s commit to being the unexpected Samaritans our neighbors desperately need.