Who are the needy in the game of golf?
Only a few days ago, one of the inquiring minds on golf’s broad social media landscape asked his readers to let him know what the words “private golf club” conjured up in their imaginations. Many of the answers similarly pointed to the line between the haves and the have-nots. One responder summed it up like this: “A place where I would like to belong but never will.”
So perhaps the needy in golf are those who must settle for public venues.
But even these golfers are playing golf. They are doing what is unimaginable to the hurt and hurting in the world.
From hundreds of years earlier, we find the grief of Jeremiah, whose heart was broken because of the plight of the women in his city.Some of the greatly pained are easy to identify. They sit on our street corners hoping for handouts, lie in hospital beds with no visitors, assemble in orphanages set aside for children who have lost their parents to AIDS or unholy holy wars. Others we never see. They suffer in silence the verbal abuses of spouses or children, endure shut-in days of chronic pain, or carry a haunting secret of their youth.
The hurt and the hurting show up in every neighborhood, every demographic, every background. But disproportionately, it is women and girls who get the brunt of trouble. In America. In Africa. In… well, everywhere.
What’s more remarkable is that we do not need hashtags or hearings or celebrity indictments to tell us this. We don’t need UN sanctions or even ministry updates. It’s right there in Scripture.
When James wrote about how we can measure true faith, he said that it has to do with how we help orphans and widows. The elders of the church (men), Paul wrote to his protégé Timothy, were to keep a special eye out to helping the widows. And from hundreds of years earlier, we find the grief of Jeremiah, whose heart was broken because of the plight of the women in his city, who had “been ravished in Zion, and virgins in the towns of Judah” (Lamentations 5:11).
Women can certainly care for women. They can stand strong together. But men, we should not leave them to do this alone. Like our brother Jeremiah, our souls should grieve over their hurting. Emotionally, culturally, spiritually, we should recognize their needs and help them—not to be heroes in their eyes but to be faithful in God’s.
—
Jeff Hopper
October 24, 2018
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.