“It isn’t any of our business, is it, Lord?” A little girl with a tender conscience asked this question in her evening prayer. She had seen a poor, needy man on the street that day. “Oh, Mama,” she had said, “let’s help him.” The mother had answered, “Come along, dear. It isn’t any of our business.”
That night, when the little girl had said, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” she added, “God, bless that poor man on the corner.” And then remembering her mother’s words that day, she added, “But really, it isn’t any of our business, is it, Lord?”
Unknowingly, the little girl expressed a tragic fact. Many of us grow up conditioned by the feeling that the world and the people about us are none of our business. How untrue! Recall Dickens’ Christmas Carol and be haunted by those words of Jacob Marley’s Ghost. “Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business Charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop in the water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
Every man is our business. What happens to the person next door, down the street, across town, yes, even beyond the ocean is our business. Out of his experience in Africa, Schweitzer diagnosed our society thus: “The spirit of the age drives us into action without allowing us to attain any clear view of the objective world and of life….It keeps us in a sort of intoxication of activity….And so we wander hither and thither in the gathering dust, formed by lack of any definite theory of the universe, like homeless, drunken mercenaries.” Isn’t that a devastating description–“homeless, drunken mercenaries?” In response, Ralph W. Sockman commented: “Homeless in spirit, though living in houses crammed with rich furnishings; drunken in the intoxicating rush for place and position; mercenaries whose eyes are ever on the market place.”
But what is really our business? Man-every man! The poor and distressed, the slurred and the slandered, the weak and the underprivileged–they are all our business. With love and concern we must reach out to them as children of God minister to them as children of God. In meeting their needs, we will feed our souls.