Thursday, September 11, 2008 Sharing our bounties By Noemi C. Fetalvero
STAND in a corner of a busy street in a metropolitan area and you find yourself brushing elbows with people whose financial status express society’s collective individuality.
The wide range of individualism include:
Those who have nothing at all have to be scavenging for food; those who work on a shoestring budget; and those who find themselves purchasing Lotto tickets, hoping to improve their lot.
And those individuals who carry brief cases in pursuit of climbing higher in the corporate ladder; and those whose finances go with the trend of the stock market; and finally, the filthy rich who do not know what to do with their money.
To each is given two empty bottles.
Should you give a destitute two empty bottles, he has a choice to fill them with hope or with despair. On the other hand, if you give a rich man the same empty bottles, just like the poor man on the street, he likewise has a choice.
He can fill them with empathy and compassion or he can succumb to greed. In a situation such as this, the size of the heart can be bigger than the fist or it can be smaller than a mustard seed.
In His earthly life, Jesus taught us how to share our bounties and talents through the different parables. The ministry that He started continues up to today.
There is now a growing trend of social awareness where the plight of our African brothers and sisters is concerned. Thousands of widows and orphans of Aids victims, who live in refugee camps, have filled their two empty bottles of milk because of an act of random kindness.
A woman established an organization that reportedly collected breast milk from nursing American mothers. She and a number of volunteers bottled the mothers’ milk and sent this bottled milk to the impoverished of Africa.
This is a very laudable act worth emulating. A thoughtful act of mercy filled up hundreds of bottles instead of just two. How about duplicating this in Philippine soil?
Our free clinics attend to hundreds of malnourished children almost on a daily basis. Perhaps we can reduce the numbers, if we jump start a similar project.
