All of us want and need someone to care about us. Without exception. Oh, I know there are people who say they don’t need anyone else.  I want to say to them “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” And I know there are those who pretend to be “hard” and try to push people away, but they aren’t kidding anyone. We all need and want someone to care. Our world is filled with people who go through life feeling hopeless, abandoned, empty, and lost.

Sadly, just as there are many who go through life feeling that way, there are those- many who call themselves followers of Jesus- who basically say, “I don’t care.”  They have cocooned themselves in a cloak that says, “My world” and have tried to shut themselves out from others.They give off the air of “I don’t care” and “Don’t bother me.”

That philosophy goes against the very teachings of Jesus in Matthew 25 when Jesus talks about the sheep and the goats and who would inherit the kingdom. Our response to those who are hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick and in prison will go a long way in determining if we are a sheep or a  goat. Will we, as followers of Christ, reach out or hunker down?

I recently read that Stephen Foster, the writer of “O Susanna” and “Camptown Races”-songs that made the world sing- died at the age of 36 as a derelict in a 25-cents-a-night flophouse, looking twice his age. I can’t help but wonder what got him there? How does someone with so much going for him/her end up lost and hopeless, a slave to drink? Then I ask myself did no one care?  Did no one reach out?  (I can’t answer that honestly because I don’t know).  It might be easy to say, “Alcohol did it” and that may be true. But what drove him to the alcohol? Was it loneliness? Hopelessness?

“Father, give me a heart for the hopeless, the lost, the hurting, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, and the sick. Help me give hope where there is none.”