I receive many messages from people who are asking for relief.
Some are from people who do were earning money from working at a job.
But now the business that they were working for has closed so they have no income.
They and the orphans that they are caring for often have no food.
While I have empathy and feel some of their pain, I understand three different categories of help:
Relief – immediate and temporary material assistance, relieving the pain and stopping the bleeding.
Rehabilitation – helping them recover to their pre-crisis situation
Development – reconciling relationships and exploring the underlying issues that tend to cause the problems.
I am a counsellor, a life coach and a business coach.
I do development work, working patiently with individuals and communities to discover the underlying causes of problems and to reconcile relationships.
Development and rehabilitation helps to provide long term benefits for individuals, communities and the world.
Relief can be beneficial in the short term yet it can, and very often does cause a lot of harm to individuals and communities.
Relief when given inappropriately or for too long tends to create unhealthy dependencies and undermine the self worth of the recipients.
I feel so tempted to provide relief to take away my pain and their much greater pain. Most of my friends would applaud me for providing relief. Many of those who have asked for relief have already told me that they would be eternally grateful if I gave them relief.
Yet I am wise enough to know that I could cause a lot of damage by well-intentioned efforts by me to give relief.