Funny how we see risks in our lives. The other day, after working on my Yamaha Cruiser, I had to put the bike back in the garage, about a ½ mile away. It was a warm and sunny evening, and my black helmet looked awfully hot. So I stuck the helmet on the back of the bike and roared down to the garage with the wind pushing through my hair. Well, I don’t have much hair for wind to push through, but you get the picture.

Risky, right? Who in their right mind would ride a motorcycle without a helmet? Anybody who rides a motorcycle a lot. It’s a funny thing we humans do, adapting to risk. The more time we spend with risk, the less it means to us. You do it too. Tearing down the highway at a rate of speed that would make someone from the 1930s die of fright. Texting/talking/surfing the web in traffic. We adapt to risk; it seems to diminish in proportion to the time we spend around it. In reality, of course, it’s not true. Only our perception of risk changes, not the actual risk. Kind of a dangerous proposition.

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For a while I have been thinking about the answer to this question.  What does it really mean to live in such a way that I am truly promoting the welfare, or well-being, of humanity? What does it involve?  What attributes of Christ can we learn from to enlarge our understanding of this idea?  At its core, my question is this – Can we understand humanitarianism as “being” rather than “doing.”  Is it really about who we are?

Along the way, I have been looking for examples of “being” that might be considered humanitarian.  I found a great one in an article entitled “Sharpshooters – The Distant Executioner” in the February 2010 Vanity Fair (a moderately guilty pleasure of mine in the realm of reading).

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I love-hate the old 90's film, "What About Bob." Every time I watch it, I laugh out loud, mostly in a nervous, really uncomfortable, I'm-not-sure-what-else-to-do, kind of way. The character,"Bob," is horrifically neurotic. He has OCD to the nth degree. He won't touch anything without cleaning it and his fears and hang-ups outnumber even the most terrified cartoon character. His only salvation, his only pathway through the bog of his own psychosis, is a pop psychologist who has penned a trite self-help book called "Baby Steps." Bob, like a desperate leech, latches on to the concept and begins to see improvement. He can suddenly take elevators by taking one baby step at a time. He can walk out of his living room because all he has to do is take one step, and then another step. Bob's obsession with the book leads to more uncomfortable, neurotic humor and the audience can chuckle because the scenario is just too absurd to be real. WE are not that crazy. WE obviously have better boundaries. We don't need to take baby steps. Right? RIGHT????

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Last week, my husband jumped out of an airplane.

For a sermon illustration.

He's done lots of things for sermon illustrations. He has used real fire and real chain saws to drive a point home. He uses the verbal illustration most often. He talks about me, his kids, and his friends in sermons all the time.  If you know him long enough, you will appear in the weekly sermon. It's an honor, actually. Well, most of the time. He once tattled on me to the whole congregation, claiming that I was a "cusser", a foul mouthed human being. The congregation laughed, because they all knew he was exaggerating,  and I had to answer a thousand questions about the incident inthe hallways after the service. In my defense, I uttered one small word (not even a really bad one) in front of my kids and they delighted in repeating it over and over. They told daddy and a sermon illustration was born. You just can't trust kids these days. I must note here that sometimes the stories in his messages are stretched the ever most teensiest bit.