What's your priority?

I have been hiding lately.  While watching mind-numbing TV as I crochet or fold laundry, I have found myself needing to hide from these ASPCA or ORCA commercials that show pathetic, thin, neglected animals with some music meant to stir the emotions.



I am an animal lover.  I have plenty of them.  But what disturbs me are the nagging questions...

Should I give my $20 bucks a month to sponsor a dog in need, or a child in another country?  Are animals, typically brought into the world without homes and people who care for them and then used by humans in many despicable manners from puppy mills to dog fighting, more needy than a child in poverty?  What about the children, not the women but the little girls, who are sold into sex trafficking?  What about the child soldier who belongs to no one now?  What about the elderly being warehoused in a nursing facility?  If we respect life, really, shouldn't that mean that we respect all life?  And, do we really respect life?

What makes someone valuable?  What they can do for me?  How well they function in my life or in their own life? 

Not sure it is as simple as I care for people and you care for animals and that dude over there cares for the environment....but I must care, and be careful.  Hearts hurt.  Bones break.  Bellies rumble.  Hopeless stench of garbage and death suffocates. 

I have the opportunity to care, to make a difference.  Perhaps, it might not be too strong to say that I have an

OBLIGATION?





"They also will answer,
'Lord,
when did we see you hungry
or thirsty
or a stranger
or needing clothes
or sick
or in prison,

and did not help you?'



"He will reply,
'I tell you the TRUTH,
whatever you did not do
for one of the least of these,
you did not do for me.'
(Matthew 25:44-45 NIV)

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