Humor

For the past eight years, the non-profit organization CARE has been tracking what it calls the year’s ten worst humanitarian crises. This year places like Angola, Zambia, Burundi, and Uganda faced famines, wars, or crises that impacted at least one million people. CARE uses a media monitoring service to count the number the crisis gets mentioned in mainstream media sources. Then it compares that number to the number of times more popular stories get mentioned.

Here are some examples from their annual report: There were over 273,000 online articles about the new Barbie film, while the abuse of women’s rights in every country in the report received next to no coverage. The crisis in Angola received the least media attention in 2023. Despite 7.3 million people in the country in desperate need of humanitarian aid, it received just 1,049 media mentions.

By comparison, 273,421 articles were written about the new iPhone 15. Taylor Swift’s world tour garnered 163,368 articles while Prince Harry’s book Spare got 215,084. Meanwhile, drought and floods in Zambia had 1,371 articles.

The CARE report concludes: “In a world where news cycles are becoming more short-lived, it is more important than ever that we collectively remember that every crisis, whether forgotten or not, brings with it a human toll.”

In 1989 [in Los Angeles], Mother Teresa visited some homeless Latino men living in a church-sponsored shelter program. Mother Teresa expressed the hope that people in Los Angeles would find housing, food, and work for these men.

Someone asked if she realized that it was against the law for American citizens to employ illegal aliens or offer them shelter. Mother Teresa replied, "Is it not breaking the law of God to keep them on the streets?"

When Keith Stonehouse started receiving a flurry of orders from the takeout service GrubHub, it didn’t take him long to realize what had happened. Stonehouse had allowed his six-year-old son Mason to play on his phone before bed. Mason rewarded his kindness by ordering a whole lot of food. “Why did you do this?” asked Stonehouse to Mason, who hid under his comforter. Mason replied, “I don’t know. I was hungry.” Mason then proceeded to interrupt his father’s lecture to ask if the pizzas he ordered had arrived yet.

Stonehouse later said that the $439 pizza order was canceled by his bank for appearing fraudulent. But that more than $1,000 worth of food was successfully ordered and delivered, creating a very full refrigerator and emergency offers to friends and neighbors to share the unforeseen bounty. Stonehouse said, “I had to keep stepping out of [his] room and calming myself down. You want to yell at your son, but he’s only six.”

The next day, Stonehouse and his wife sat down with Mason and had a talk with him, explaining the gravity of his actions. They explained that because he did this without permission, they would have to use the $150 in his piggy bank to help pay for all the hot dogs, chili cheese fries, jumbo shrimps, and other foods. Stonehouse said, “We showed him one-by-one. He was a little devastated but he understood.”

​Possible Preaching Angle:

We've all had moments where our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, but immaturity only increases our susceptibility to temptation.

When Emily Bugg and Billy Lewis wanted to celebrate their love and share it with others, the COVID-19 pandemic put a damper on their plans. But it couldn’t stop their generosity. When the couple was forced to abandon their plans for a lavish celebration, they instead opted for a small ceremony at city hall with a few friends. But having canceled their venue, they were still committed to a $5,000 catering deposit. Rather than try to sue or seek arbitration to get their money back, they decided to ask the caterer for a special order.

Caterer Heidi Coudal recalled, “They said, 'Is there any way we could do something good with our deposit?’” Having previously worked with Thresholds, a nonprofit mental health services provider in the area, Bugg made arrangements for the caterer to make Thanksgiving meal packages that could be delivered to those in need.

According to Thresholds CEO Mark Ishaug, their annual Thanksgiving client meal had been canceled because of the pandemic. He said, “It really couldn't have come at a better time. It's an example of goodness begetting more goodness. In this time of despair and this time of sadness and anxiety and frustration, we need more goodness. This is just one example of how we can take a really dark time and make it much brighter.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes God allows us to encounter disappointment in order to prepare us to be a blessing to others; if you’re feeling disappointed, look for the opportunity to turn your situation into a blessing for someone else.

James Charles decided that he wanted to help alleviate the problem of people without homes. Lacking access to any kind of large-scale shelter, Charles did the next best thing and used what he owned--a car dealership. In a Facebook post for his Kiplin Auto Group, Charles announced that he was offering up a safe space in his lot for people who need to sleep in their cars, promising an environment “free from disturbance, trespassing, harassment or worse.”

Charles said, “We know that some families are struggling and in a tough situation. Whole families sleeping in the car. You would say … (how about) the shelters? They are full guys. ... We can’t put everyone in a hotel, but we can get you a safe place for the night.”

Since the initial announcement and the media coverage it generated, Charles has received donations from others wanting to help. He started a GoFundMe campaign for the families staying on his lot, pledging to add $200 for every car sale.

Possible Preaching Angle:

To be the hands and feet of Jesus, we must see Him in others, particularly those in need, whom we are in a position to help.

Did you know that Emperor penguins spend about 4 months fasting as they watch over, care for, and incubate their eggs? This is a 100 to a 115 day fast! If a penguin can spend 100 days not eating because it instinctually loves and is waiting for its baby penguin, we can spend a meal or a day or a week fasting out of our love for Jesus. Don’t let the penguins beat us!

Possible Preaching Angle:

This can be used as creative tip to engage people in the topic of fasting.

Bright, affable Jay’Veontae Hudson isn’t the typical student that one would associate with chronic homelessness. But his senior year will be his first at Portland’s Parkrose High School with a stable home situation.

As a middle schooler, his family situation prompted a sudden leave. After bouncing around with friends and family members alike, Hudson was constantly moving from place to place. Upon arriving at Parkrose, he got connected to the Gateway System. This is a district-mandated set of programs that help provide kids like him with the necessary resources they need. But still, he needed more help. “There was a place to go,” Hudson said, “but there was no place to live.”

One year, as spring break approached, he reached out to a friend. The friend put him in touch with an English teacher named Jacquelyn Meza, whose parents had some extra space. While Hudson stayed with her parents, Meza put more time and effort to find Hudson a more permanent situation.

Eventually, Hudson ended up staying with math teacher Tammy Stamp, who agreed to be a foster care provider. Now, instead of relying solely upon his own wits and resources, he has Stamp as another loving presence to help. Hudson said, “It’s weird because I’m used to being the only one responsible for myself. She buys all my toothpaste and floss now.”

Potential Preaching Angles: Being the hands and feet of Jesus means helping not only to meet spiritual and emotional needs, but also physical needs.

When Rev. Heber Brown III started noticing a particular need trending in his church, he did what pastors do – he found a way to spearhead a solution. Jesus said that man shall not live by bread alone; now, neither do the people under Brown’s care.

That’s because his church, Pleasant Hope Baptist, planted a community garden in order to provide the people in their community with fresh produce. Since food deserts, obesity, and diabetes plague many parts of Baltimore, the garden is meeting a critical need in the community.

Not content to keep all the goodness, Brown considered what might happen if he could find other local and regional partners. “We saw attendance bump up in our worship, we saw a great energy … and it went so [well] here, that I wondered what would happen if we could spread it through other churches and create a network of churches that do the same thing.”

Spreading it around meant not only partnering with local farmers and starting a pop-up farmers’ market after church, but partnering with other churches in neighboring Baltimore, Washington D.C., Virginia, and North Carolina in an initiative known as the The Black Church Food Security Network.

“If you come in with the mentality that I cannot be fully free until everybody is fully free, it makes for better partners,” said Rev. Brown, in a local radio interview. “And if we are strategic in being courageous subversives for each other, then I think the world that our children will inherit will be better than the one that we’re in right now.”

Potential Preaching Angles:

God cares about all of our needs, and Jesus often paired spiritual renewal with the meeting of physical needs. So if we’re going to be like Jesus, it might mean helping people get enough healthy food to eat.

Conventional wisdom surrounding the function of taste buds focuses on five essential types of flavor sensations: sweet, salty, savory, sour and bitter. To that list, scientists have added a sixth taste—starchy.

Professor Joyun Lim from Oregon State University, explains the justification for the recent addition. Lim's team of researchers found volunteers who could identify starch-like tastes in various carb solutions, even after being administered a solution that blocked the taste of sweetness. Lim said, "Asians would say it was rice-like, while Caucasians described it as bread-like or pasta-like. It's like eating flour."

Of course, starch has yet to be completely enshrined in the proverbial Hall of Taste. Food scientists insist that primary tastes be recognizable, have identifiable taste receptors on the tongue, and trigger a useful physiological response.

Lim and other scientists are working on finding those taste receptors, but for useful physiology, one need look no further than elite athletes. There's a reason why bodybuilders, distance runners, and basketball players all use terms like "carbing up" or "carb loading" to describe their culinary habits. The cliché is true—the body knows what it wants.

Potential preaching angles: To hunger and thirst after righteousness, we must recognize its taste, God's wisdom is evident in creation through cravings that track our bodily needs

According to CNN, ranchers of the prized breed of cattle known as Wagyu go to great lengths to enhance the already legendary flavor of their beef. They use typical fattening agents in their feed to achieve a certain amount of marbling, which enhances its appearance and keeps it moist. But an Australian ranch called Mayura Station produces Wagyu beef with a distinctive, sweet taste to it. The secret is in a special blend of cattle feed, which includes copious amounts of sweetening agents—or as most of us would call it—candy.

The envy of ten-year-olds worldwide, cattle at Mayura Station bred as Wagyu subsist on a diet of chocolate, cookies and candy, often sold as irregular or expired stock from brand-name factories like Cadbury. Their regular feed is more of a pedestrian blend (or is it equestrian? Bovestrian?) of wheat, hay, rye grass, and maize. But the candy mix is a special addition that the cattle eat for the last few months of their lives before they're slaughtered and processed.

This unorthodox approach appears to be working; the most choices cuts of Wagyu beef from Mayura Station can retail for as much as $300 per pound.

Potential Preaching Angles: The importance of ingesting truth, beauty and goodness. What goes in, will come out. The fragrance of Christ is most pungent in times of intense suffering and pain.

The following story was shared by Ed Salmon, a pastor from South Carolina, who passed away in 2016:

Just yesterday, I went out for lunch. When I got to Forest Park, there's usually a homeless man or two standing there, and there was this terribly disheveled man standing there with his sign, "I'm homeless." And of course, he was going by the cars, and nobody looked at him. He got to my car, and I rolled down the window, and I said, "I don't have any money with me, but my wife is going to take me to the airport in about an hour and a half, and I'll have something for you then. And do you know what he said to me? He said, "Thank you for looking at me." Didn't say a word about money. He said, "Thank you for looking at me."

Salmon then gave the following charge to his fellow ministers (although this can apply to every Christian): "You see, the Good Shepherd is raising you up so that the world you minister to can look at you and say, "Thank you for looking at me, because in that, I see the glory of God."

Every night a group of Christians in London don blue jackets and baseball caps and roam the streets. They call themselves the "street pastors." As they walk the streets in middle of the night, they help to diffuse arguments, listen to people's problems, minister to the homeless, help a drunk get to the right bus or taxi, or hand out bottled water. The influence of these dedicated and lay leaders has been remarkable. London's metropolitan web site states: "Almost every London borough now has a street pastors team and the most immediate result in every case has been the drop in crime in areas where teams have been working." A former bobby (policeman) told the Spectator his district "would be much, much harder to police without the street pastors."

Every street pastor begins his/her evening with prayer and meditation on Bible verses. They all acknowledge they have many people who pray for them. Communities respect their work but the comment they hear most often is "You're mad." The author of the Spectator article writes: "This spirituality makes itself felt not through any ostentatious zeal but rather, I sense, through a feeling that it is entirely natural to be out at 2 a.m. helping people get home."

The Spectator writer spent an evening with a team and noticed two things:

[First], almost everything they do is utterly mundane and obvious. Our first stop is at a couple of corner shops, just to say hello, ask how business is, talk about the weather. When we pass a rough sleeper in a doorway, they go over, check what he needs and offer him an extra blanket; afterwards, they can inform homelessness services. When a drunk man comes out of the pub, a couple of the team wander over to make sure he knows where he's going. When we pass a few skater kids, Philip pauses for a chat. It is pretty low-level stuff—but it is exactly the low-level stuff which can be missing from British cities, especially after dark. The second thing I noticed was my mood steadily lifting: the street pastors' good cheer is infectious.

http://www.streetpastors.org/ (watch the 6 minute video)

Dr. Robertson McQuilkin of Columbia International University tells a story about visiting his son in India. His son was working and living in the slums of Calcutta (a city of fifteen million) not far from the ministry of the Sisters of Charity, the group Mother Teresa began. McQuilkin was a seasoned world traveler, but here the squalor of poverty that he witnessed on the drive from the airport simply overwhelmed him. The smells of humanity and sewer water combined with a million people living on the streets brought him to tears.

His driver noticed this and said to him, "Don't worry, Dr. McQuilkin. In a few days you'll get used to it." McQuilkin responded, "That's exactly what I don't want to happen. I don't want to get used to it."

An El Dorado Hills, California family overcame their own emotional turmoil to turn a canceled wedding into a special event for approximately 100 less fortunate people. David Duane said his 27-year-old daughter, Quinn, announced that the groom had called off the wedding, five days before the event.

The reception venue, the Citizen Hotel in downtown Sacramento, had been booked months in advance. Duane said he and his wife knew they could not expect a refund at such a late date. "We said, 'Hey, do we just not do anything, or do we go down and do something?'"

His wife, Kari, came up with the idea of hosting people who were homeless or in need at what was intended to have been the wedding dinner. She contacted Next Move and program director LaTisha Daniels. The organization's mission is to provide shelter and other services to help people transition out of homelessness. Daniels took charge, inviting individuals and families, and providing bus passes so they could get to the dinner, David Duane said.

Duane and his wife were on hand at 5 P.M. to welcome people to the buffet dinner that would otherwise have been served to wedding guests. "It was a fabulous night, a great evening," Duane said. He talked to a number of the guests and listened to stories of the difficulties they have faced. Wedding costs, including the honeymoon, he said, totaled more than $30,000. "As a family," Duane said, "we took away something good from this."

Possible Preaching Angles: Many that God invited to the wedding banquet of his Son have declined. It is now our mission to joyfully extend the invitation to the poor and needy so that heaven will be full and its riches will be fully enjoyed.