Happy to Help Out

April 13

"Live in peace with each other. ... Encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone." 1 Thessalonians 5:13-14

Happy to Help Out

It had been a long day on Capitol Hill for Senator John Stennis. After parking the car, he walked toward his front door. Then it happened. Two people came out of the darkness, robbed him, and shot him twice.

Another politician was driving home when he heard about the shooting. He turned his car around and drove directly to the Walter Reed Hospital, where Stennis would be operated on for seven hours. News of the shooting of Senator Stennis, the chairman of the powerful Armed Forces Committee, shocked the nation, and the hospital staff was swamped with the incoming calls about the Senator’s condition.

The politician spotted an unattended switchboard, sat down, and voluntarily went to work. He took calls until daylight. Then finally getting up, he stretched, put on his overcoat, and went over to say good luck to the other operators.

“I’m Mark Hatfield. Happy to help out,” he said. Then Senator Mark Hatfield, a conservative Republican who often disagreed withs the liberal policies of Stennis, a Democrat, unobtrusively walked out. Unknown Author



We live in a time when many people not only wish ill upon their perceived enemies, upon those who oppose their goals, but they also endeavor to perpetrate ill against those who seem to stand between them and their aspirations.

We have individuals who tell slanderous lies about those who stand in their way; we have politicians who denigrate one another and fabricate all manner of ill against their opposition; we have terrorists who wreak havoc upon those whose worldview differs from their own.

In all these scenarios and in others too numerous to mention, we see people trampling underfoot the Word of the Lord which admonishes, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31.

Jesus did not utter this timeless admonition merely to sound lofty in the hearing of His listeners through the generations; He lived them. As He hung on a cross, after being scourged with 40 lashes of the notorious Roman ‘cat of nine tails,’ after being spat upon, after being mocked, He said, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” Luke 23:34.

Are we ready to lay aside our petty differences, our animosities, in order to, as did Senator Hatfield--to step in to help when a political opponent had been fiercely attacked? Are we ready to lay aside our desire for retribution as did Jesus when He was humiliated and physically abused unto death?

If we can’t, we are on the world’s wave length, not God’s, for He has admonished us that unless we forgive others, we cannot ourselves be forgiven, Colossians 3:13, Ephesians 4:32. With such a weighty matter as our eternal salvation in the balance, should we not let go of our ‘right to be right’ and allow ourselves to forgive as Jesus forgave?