Charity means serving people you don't like

When I was growing up, my family moved a lot.  We moved 12 or 13 times (I think) before I left for college.  One move was particularly difficult on me.  I remember crying when we left my grandparents in Midland, Texas and moved to Bakersfield, California.  Both places were oil towns, and both places were hot.  It shouldn't have been a big change.

It was.

I didn't have any friends after we moved.  To be fair to the good citizens of Bakersfield, I was very awkward and unattractive at that time.  Money was very very tight for our family, so my mom made my clothes (uncool!) and I wore pretty tacky glasses.  I had no idea how to do my hair and in general, I looked pretty ugly.  I was also very bookish and prone to speak my mind too much.  Add to that my tendency to suck up to adults, and I will admit, I was not easy to love.

However, when I moved, there was someone who should have been my dear friend, or at least nice to me.  She was smart, like me.  She sang in choir, like me. She was a swimmer, like me. We were the same age.  Perhaps most importantly, however, she was Mormon, just like me, so we went to church together.  For some reason, perhaps my clothing, perhaps my accent, to this day I still don't know, she took an immediate disliking to me.  She made fun of me, she ensured her friends and family despised me by telling them lies, and she went out of her way to make my life miserable any way she could.

In the face of all this inexplicable hostility, I did as I had been taught.  I hunkered down, became more meek, and more kind.  I picked her roses from our front yard and took them to her.  I made her cookies.  I made her cards.  I was unfailingly nice.  I can honestly say that I acted with unfailing kindness and charity toward her.

Basically I was a completely pathetic chump, and things only got worse.

Eventually, after two very long years, I got into high school, where the opinion of one person didn't matter so much.  A year later, we finally moved back to Texas and I closed that chapter in my life.

Where am I going with this story?  Well, I learned from Miss Hansen that sometimes we must love people, and we must treat them kindly, even when they do not reciprocate.  I learned that doing so can be hard, but it is still the correct path.  I didn't fully realize until years later that my dad had been struggling with a nearly identical situation at work.  He didn't take his boss roses, but he dealt with almost the same issues.  It would have given me a little extra perspective, that although it was exacerbated by my age, this same difficulty can recur over and over in any walk of life.  Of course, I was a teenager, so once I was removed from the terrible situation, I promptly forgot everything I learned.

Not too long ago, my parents had a friend I will call Tom Thumb.  This friend was a mooch in every sense of the word.  Tom had lost his job, his marriage and many other things and was in pretty humble circumstances.  All of those things generated a substantial amount of sympathy toward him, and my parents gave and gave and gave.  My husband and I had cause to come into contact with him, too.  We gave to him as well, and were rewarded by his complaints about our gift and then by his theft of cash we had not properly secured.  It soured us on Tom from that point forward.  As time went on, we watched him continue to siphon resources of both time and money from my parents any time he could, in any method he could contrive.

Before I continue, I should mention that my husband works in the Emergency Room.  He works nights, weekends, and holidays when most people are home with their families.  He has been punched, spat upon, puked on, bled on and kicked.  People swear at him every night.  People call him names, and yell at him and abuse him every which way.  I say this only to make it clear that Whitney is no stranger to being mistreated.

I had spoken with my mom, and heard of some new way Tom was taking advantage of my parents and I was grumbling to my husband.

"It's so frustrating for me to think," I said, "that our tithing and fast offering money that we give to the church with open hearts is going to people like Tom.  I'm happy to give to someone who has fallen on hard times, and who really needs it, but I don't want my money going to a good-for-nothing-sponge who just sucks up resources from everyone because he's made bad choices and is lazy."

What my husband said next was a (well needed) slap in the face for me.

"But that's exactly where our fast offerings go, and it's where they should go.  They go to people who made poor decisions.  They go to people who haven't planned and who aren't living frugally.  That's precisely why they need it.  Charity isn't about giving things to nice people who you want to spend time with.  It's giving it to the people who are unworthy, by very definition."

His words sunk deep into my soul.  I still think about what he said there, that day, because it is so simple, and yet so true.  Giving to people you like, or people with bad luck, or people the world has wronged, that's easy.  That's friendship, or at the very least, that's rewarding.

It is not charity.

Timothy 1:5 reads, "Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned:"

A pure heart doesn't judge the person receiving the aid and withhold it when it's the wounded person's fault.  A pure heart gives to the person in need, regardless of why he needs it.  I'm not saying we should throw our money away and just give away everything we have, but I am saying that charity is giving to anyone in need, regardless of whether they have clean hands.  

1 Corinthians 13 calls charity "the pure love of Christ", and explains that, "it endureth forever."

Forever, not until the person annoys you.  Forever, not until the person steals from you.  You don't get to revoke that love when Tom takes advantage of you, or you deem him unworthy.  You love him Forever.

It got me thinking about how I had been so faithful as a child, even in the face of great personal adversity.  I continued to turn the other cheek.  I was kind, to a fault, to a person who made my life miserable.

Then I thought beyond that, to a more perfect example.  Our Savior lived a perfect life and then sacrificed that life for all of us, even though every single one of us is patently unworthy.  Every single one of us sins.  That sacrifice is why His love is greater than all.  Most poignantly to me, the Savior, in the act of laying down His perfect life, was spat upon, mistreated, called names and abused.  He was forced to carry His own instrument of death.  When the world mourned for His death, when the winds wailed and the storms came, He cried out for mercy on his assailants, He asked His Father to forgive the men who killed him, for they knew not what they were doing.

So my prayer to you all today is to reach into your hearts, and find that charity, that love for the unlovable, and do a tiny piece of Christ's work by serving someone you may despise with a happy heart.  Give to someone who doesn't deserve it, because they are the ones who need it most.  The gap between me and those I perceive as undeserving is far smaller than the gap between Jesus Christ and myself.  He bridged that gap for me.  I don't think I can do any less than try to emulate Him on a smaller scale.  I hope we can all remember this and try to do the same, because in its simplest form, charity means serving and loving people you don't like.