We have all seen the emails, the Twitter post, the Facebook post, and other social media post in which someone is showing the picture of a child or adult in need of help, financial or physical. So many times, these pleas are old and outdated or just downright frauds. Other times the pleas are real and in earnest, but the frauds hurt the real pleas. How do we tell the difference or should we even try. I for one, have given up and just delete the emails or ignore the social media pleas considering them to all be frauds or outdated.
Last night, Brad Paisley and his wife told about the fraud they experienced in which a woman pretended to be a child dying with cancer. She did not ask for money, but did ask for their time and for Brad Paisley to sing Amazing Grace to her. When the law caught her, they prosecuted her and she is now serving time in jail because the song was worth $5,000. I thought, “Good for you for prosecuting the culprit who played upon people’s desires to help others in need.
This morning, as I read in the Daily Guidepost 2013, I had to change my attitude. The story was about a little girl and a plea for help in obtaining a help dog that would recognize when the little girl had a seizure. The plea came via email. Joshua Sundquist, the author of the daily story, wrote that he did not know how he could come up with the money to help the child. A company he was speaking at donated what they thought was the whole sum of money, $1,000, to get the girl the dog. The little girl’s mother thanked them for the donation but informed them that the amount was not $1,000 but $10,000. Mr. Sundquist was not sure how he alone could come up with the money. He was pondering the situation when God told him that his contacts could help. He sent the word out using his Internet video blog. Within four days, the money had been donated and the little girl got her much-needed dog (Sundquist, 2012, pg. 342).
We do not know if all the pleas for help are real. We do not know which ones are frauds, are outdated, and are new pleas from someone who truly has desperate need of help or prayer. What we have is God to help us discern the truth from the lies, the current from the old. We may not be able to help the truly needy physically or financially, but we can pray that God will send the right person to the person in need who can help or can find people who are willing and able to help. We should never just close our eyes to the plight of those in need believing that once again the story is fake or old. If we pray over each plea for help, then we are helping because when a person posts a fraud or old story to gain recognition for him or herself or to steal money or time from others, that person is in need of help, also. That person has need of God’s divine intervention to help him or her to move past individual need to defraud or steal from others. The person may have a true mental disability that causes him or her to post fraudulent request. Therefore, in the future, instead of deleting or ignoring, I will pray not only for the person in the story, but I will also pray for the person posting the story.
Reference
Sundquist, J. (2012). Daily Guidepost 2013, November Thu 7. Guidepost NY.
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