The Dismal Science

There is a small poster, framed and pristine, that sits in our cafeteria. It is engraved with a simple truth that this ships wishes to remind us. “For every person we help, there are hundreds more who wait.” I’ve pasted this message a hundred with no more a thought to it than the ground I walk on. It seems that it’s not until you are with it face to face that you realize. I’ll simply say that it is a strange thing to wish and pray for a tumor, and a heartbreaking tragedy to have it be a goiter. No, it’s not until you see the broken and beaten face of this truth that you think about it, but when you realize, it hits you like a freight train. We read of our Jesus healing all those he came to touch, with unlimited power, our god the infinite. Yet this is not our reality. The sad truth is that a fact about our state of being is that we are finite, limited. No matter how vast and infinite our universe may be, it is quite limited to us, and there is simply not enough to go around. So being finite, limited, with only so much to give, we find our selves under the laws and rules of economics. We must use what we have to help the most we can. In the end we are called to help the ones we can and to let go the ones we cannot. Knowing this fact does not make it easier though. How are you suppose to tell someone so broken and beaten that we cannot help them; that we have no cure for the misfortunes of their life? How do you tell someone “you are going to die”?