Part 1 of 4 in a series on what it actually looks like to live out justice instead of just believing in it. Four weeks, four verbs: messy, specific, busy, and (I promise) jiggy. So, let’s get started.
According to AP-NORC polling, most American adults who give to charity each year do it with money, not time or personal contact. Roughly three in four adults report donating money to a cause in the past year, while only about three in ten say they volunteered any time at all. The gap tells us that most of American generosity flows through channels that never require a face, a name, or a personal conversation.
I myself have leaned disproportionately on the recurring donations that show up on my credit card statement each month and the seasonal donations of canned foods, hygiene products or winter coats collected at work or in the church lobby. Somewhere in the back of my mind a small light goes on that says I’m doing good, and then I move on.
But if I never have to see a face, hear a story, or sit through an uncomfortable silence with somebody, have I actually done what Scripture keeps asking of me? Or have I just found an efficient shortcut to a much smaller version of the command to love my neighbor as myself?
Proximity
Scripture describes caring for the vulnerable using the language of proximity, not transaction. Proximity means nearness that costs you something: your time, your comfort, your carefully managed schedule. It extends the service beyond the event and keeps asking something of you the next week, and the week after that.
That's why Scripture keeps reaching for images of closeness instead of images of exchange. Widows and orphans absent from the table get noticed. The stranger arrives with a name you're expected to learn how to say correctly. And Jesus told his followers to visit the prisoner using the same verb you'd use for checking on a sick relative down the street. Proximity sees the people and recognizes their dignity.
Transactions
The transactional approach is easier: write the check, set up the automated donation, deliver the canned food, or add the name to the prayer list.
None of that is a bad thing to do because donations of money, food and clothing matter and the prayer of the righteous can accomplish much. It becomes a problem when we limit our giving, service, and care for the vulnerable to transactions and never have to actually look them in the eye, know their name, or connect with them. Don’t stop your donations and prayers, but let’s admit that those alone aren’t the same thing as loving your neighbor as yourself.
When Jesus encountered a man with leprosy in Mark 1, he could have healed him with a simple word spoken from several feet away. Instead, the text says he reached out and touched him first, which he had no medical or theological need to do. He did the same thing at Jairus's house in Mark 5, taking a dead girl's hand in his own after the mourners outside had already given up and moved on to grief. And when a funeral procession in Nain stopped him cold on the road in Luke 7, Jesus walked up to the coffin carrying a widow's only son and touched it, an act that would have made him ceremonially unclean, before he ever said a word to the boy inside it. Consider also Luke 19 when a short, despised tax collector climbed a tree just to catch a glimpse of him. Jesus didn't just glance up and offer a blessing, but invited himself to dinner at Zacchaeus's house, turning a passing moment into an afternoon at somebody's table. All too often when the comfort and safety of distance was available to Jesus, he declined it.
This was the whole method. God didn't send a memo down to earth explaining what love looks like. Instead, God moved into the neighborhood via Jesus and let it cost him his life. If proximity was good enough for the incarnation, it's probably good enough for a morning at a shelter or driving someone to the DMV to fill out forms.
A friend from a small group I was part of years ago once described a service opportunity our church was organizing as an afternoon spent at the church building, playing games and just talking with a family that was going through a hard stretch. To get people to sign up, he pitched it to the room as a “very clean and comfortable” way to serve. No mess and no danger, he said. Nothing like the soup kitchen shifts or the shelter nights where things could get awkward fast.
That pitch for clean and comfortable service revealed that we had built a whole hierarchy of service opportunities ranked by how little they’d cost us emotionally, and the ones we called “clean” were the ones where real contact, real story, and real discomfort had been carefully engineered out of the experience. I don’t think anyone meant harm by it, and that friend indeed had a heart to serve. But to me it felt like we had accepted the idea that closeness to someone else’s pain is a risk to be minimized rather than an opportunity to lean into.
Perhaps the real reason we tend to default to the distant version is that it doesn’t cost us as much emotionally. A donation is an investment of money or things that neither disappoints nor involves the complexity, emotional friction, unpredictability, awkwardness, or other stuff of relationships that don’t always resolve neatly. But a relationship is an entanglement that might ask more of you next month than it did this one. It might even unsettle an opinion you were pretty confident about or might not resolve into anything tidy at all.
That cost is real, and pretending it isn’t only guarantees we’ll keep choosing the version that avoids it.
So here's the uncomfortable inventory. Think of the person, the family, or the cause you've been supporting: maybe a recurring donation charge, a can of soup, a name on a list you pray through once a week without ever hearing their voice. None of that is wasted. But is there anyone on that list you've quietly decided to keep at arm's length, not because you don't care, but because getting closer might ask something of you that a donation never will? Hold that person in mind, because the list below is aimed at them.
Twenty Messier Ways to Show Up
If distance is the default, here are some concrete ways to close it.
1. Eat a meal inside the food bank or shelter instead of dropping off food at the food drive and leaving.
2. Learn the names of the regulars at the food pantry table and use them the next time you see them.
3. Sit down next to the person outside the grocery store instead of walking past with a dollar and your eyes forward. Introduce yourself and learn their name.
4. Become a CASA volunteer rather than simply donating to a foster care organization.
5. Visit the nursing home resident whose family stopped coming years ago and ask about her life before that room. Then visit them again and again.
6. Drive a foster kid or senior to their doctor’s appointment instead of dropping supplies at the agency or facility.
7. Write letters to someone who’s incarcerated, rather than giving once a year to a prison ministry.
8. Hire someone recently released from prison, instead of writing a check to the nonprofit that helps people like him find work. And refer them to others to do the same.
9. Sit at a family’s kitchen table while they work through a lease or a form they don’t fully understand, rather than funding the agency that serves them.
10. Learn to pronounce a stranger’s name the way their own family says it.
11. Show up to someone’s immigration, custody, or benefits hearing or check-in so they aren’t the only face in the room without support.
12. Trade the annual toy drive drop-off for an afternoon actually spent with the kids who’ll open those toys.
13. Ask a single parent what her week actually looks like, then offer to take one specific thing off her plate instead of a general “let me know if you need anything.”
14. Invite someone recently released from prison to your table for a regular meal, not a one-time gesture.
15. Volunteer for the overnight shift at a shelter instead of the daytime slot where you never actually see who sleeps there.
16. Ride the bus or walk the route someone without a car has to take, at least once, to understand what their day costs them.
17. Drive an immigrant to the DMV and help them with the paperwork to get their ID or driver license (a first step for getting other benefits).
18. Skip the check to the youth tutoring nonprofit this month and tutor a kid yourself, in person, on a schedule you actually keep.
19. Ask an elderly neighbor to tell you about their life before you knew them and actually remember what they say. Arrange a follow-up conversation over coffee where they live or at your kitchen table.
20. Show up to the same soup kitchen or shelter often enough that people start recognizing your face, not just your donation.
None of these require a platform, a title, or a theology degree. They just require showing up somewhere you’d normally avoid and staying long enough for it to get uncomfortable.
I still make the same recurring donations I mentioned at the start of this article, and I'm not going to stop. The donation matters. The canned food matters. But between the monthly charge and the separation created between myself and the human need, I don’t want to lose the thread of what Jesus did with his own two hands.
Jesus walked toward the leper, the coffin, and the tax collector's tree when every social instinct of his day told him to keep his distance. Getting messy isn't the opposite of generosity; rather, it is what generosity was supposed to look like all along.
For Further Reflection:
Name one person or cause you’ve been supporting from a distance, and something you can do to close that distance this week? Anything from the list of 20 above?
Next week is Part 2, “Let’s Get Specific”. Once you've closed the distance and gotten messy, the next question is whether you're willing to say out loud what you actually see.
Harvey, Part 1 was wonderful! Great recommendations and someone who has no xtra money could do most of them. Keep up the great work! I am your number 1 fan!
Another excellent article. I appreciate how you help us see Jesus’ heart and connection to people, the challenge to do likewise, and the many practical suggestions. Looking forward to the rest of this series. Thank you Harvey!