Thursday, December 1, 2011

Scarcity of Charity

In Elder's Quorum we were talking about being charitable and one of the class members commented that he was trying to be more planned/deliberately charitable. He is good at being randomly charitable. Say he's raking leaves off his lawn, he'll just hop over and do the neighbor's lawn or something. His goal now wasn't to stop being randomly charitable (I suppose serviceable could work here too) but to start being more organized. His flow chart of charity went kind of like this.

Take care of family --> Take care of Home Teachees --> Take Care of Everyone Else

If you think about it, this kind of reasoning makes sense. Let's assume that everyone was charitably perfect. Meaning all their free time was given to performing charitable acts for others. Now in this world these people only prescribe themselves to random acts of charity. You would think that this would mean that everyone would equally receive adequate charity and on average you would be correct. The average amount of charitable acts that people receive would be something like 5 per day.

The problem with this system is that even though we have a high average, there are people who get more and people who get less, or might be missed completely. (Now I'm starting to sound like Occupy Wall Street). So what it looks like to me is that the Lord has given us a system that makes sure that everyone gets covered. We have all sorts of stewardship programs. The Prophet and apostles steward the church, the 70's steward regions, Stake Presidents steward smaller regions, Bishops steward wards, Quorum/Relief Society Presidents steward units within the ward, Parents steward families and then to top it off we assign people a small number of other people to steward through Home Teaching and Visiting Teaching programs.

Now if only we could get to that point of perfect charity...

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