Helping Hands Without Destroying

One of the attributes of a civilized and cultured person is: Compassion.

Compassion that that is beyond mere words, empirically verifiable by practical and effective actions, one of which is in rendering help to others, a Helping Hand or Two.

Helping Hands not only benefit the recipients, it also blesses the giver, as the saying goes: “It is more blessed to give than to receive”.

The irony of it all is there seems to be a lack of “Blessed Givers” and more wanting Receivers.

Helping others is a universal cross cultural value and there is no culture anywhere in the world, then, now or even in he future, which condemns or denounces the giving of aid to the less fortunate, although there are many cultures that do not encourage and would in fact prohibit helping one's rivals or enemies.

True Helping Hands helps irrespective of creed, class, color, species, race, religion or even relationship or the lack of it.

The litmus test is helping others in need even when the other party is your enemy or an animal, all because True Helping Hands are intrinsically altruist in object and motivation.

It may surprise us now, but as late as the mid Sixteenth Century CE, people groups like the Red Indians of the Americas and Blacks of Africa were classified as “barbarians” fit only for “natural slavery” as they are no better than animals and therefore justified to be kept as slaves and treated like farmed animals.

We may look back and realize quite intuitively that this was an erroneous notion, but alas, humanity may not have progresses any further from the identical mindset that hatch such inhumane paradigm.

It therefore should not surprise us why many people in the Twenty First Century CE still treat animals like we treat other people groups then, who may appear to differ from us, as animals.

True Helping Hands helps because help is needed at that exact point of time and space where the Helping Hands happen to be the neighbor where help is needed and could be rendered without any peril to the life and limb of the Helping Hands, or even at the risk of it, because Helping Hands care enough to support compassion with action.

The Teacher of Love and Compassion said some two millennium ago, “Love thy enemy as thyself”, always lending a helping hand to heal, to set free and to empower individuals to achieve their up most best, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, while hanging and dying being crucified on the Cross for crimes he did not commit, not only did not utter an unkind word to his enemies and accusers, but asked God to forgive them, because they were ignorant.

On the other hand, Helping Hands can also become unintentional “Destroying Hands”, when dependency became the end result of good intentioned aid. This is evidenced in many aid recipient countries in Africa where the people who were initially too weak to fend for themselves are now made too strong and lazy to look after themselves.

As the whole purpose of extending a pair of Helping Hands is “empowerment” and not mere “aid” per se, extending aid ought to be what the Chinese Sage, Confucius advocated more than 2000 years ago: “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, Teach him to fish and he eats a lifetime”.

Helping Hands can also come full circle, we help wherever we can, for who knows we may have unknowingly helped angels in the process. But whatever it is, when we have the opportunity to be Helping Hands to our neighbours, we are all blessed, the giver, the receiver and also the Creator of both.