Ten Reasons You Don’t Want to Help (But Might Anyway)

When her friend encouraged Edna to open the door to a stranger, against Edna’s better judgment, that friend said, “They might be in need of help.” The friend evidently thinks this will encourage Edna’s favorable response. But will it?

We don’t know what Edna said next, but I can think of a bunch of reasons those words might not encourage Edna to open the door! I said we’d consider that question this week. It turns out there are a lot of reasons we might not want to help another human being! Here are ten:

1. It might not be safe. When we try to help, we might open ourselves up to a dangerous situation. What if they’re fleeing from a shooter? What if they’re the shooter? We could imagine any number of ways that our kindness might put us in harm’s way.
2. It wasn’t in our plans. Whether it was watching the finale of Survivor or making that phone call to our mom, or finishing that thing that’s overdue at work, we had other plans. We had mapped out this next five minutes or next five hours according to our own purposes, and we simply don’t have time for whatever this person needs.
3. We may not understand what they’re asking. That person may not speak the same language we do, or maybe we’re aware that our own hearing loss or the effect of this medication we’re on will make it hard for us to understand them. What if they blurt something out like it’s an emergency and we can’t figure it out right away? We might end up feeling terrible, or even causing them harm by our lack of understanding.
4. We may not know how to help. What if they lay this problem on our doorstep and we don’t know what to do with it? Maybe they saw a stray cat or a child alone or in danger, just down the street. They may look to us to figure out an answer that we may not have!
5. We may not have the capacity to help. Even if it’s clear what they want from us, and we’d be glad to help, we may not be able to do it. We don’t have unlimited money or time or whatever else that request might be. Maybe we aren’t able to help move that bookcase because of a recent surgery or the effects of age.
6. We don’t want to open that can of worms. We don’t know where this conversation will lead. Even if it’s just a simple cup of sugar today, it might be feeding their cat next week, or picking up their mom at the bus station. Pretty soon we’ll feel enmeshed in whatever need this person might have. Better to just leave the door closed.
7. We don’t want to let their problem become our problem. We’ll start caring, and pretty soon we’ll be awake in the middle of the night, pondering what they–or we–can do to pull together that $300 extra they need for rent, or to keep their utilities on. They’ll begin to depend on us, with yet another watch-my-daughter or meet-the-cable-guy request, and we won’t know how to extricate ourselves.
8. We believe in personal responsibility. We don’t care if someone needs help; it’s their responsibility to solve it. Helping them doesn’t make them better; it makes them dependent. It’s better for everyone in the long run to stand by and let them sink or swim on their own.
9. We fear the thing they’ll ask of us isn’t good for them. We’ve seen how they live, and we don’t trust that boyfriend who appears most evenings in his big, loud truck. We don’t think they’re making good decisions about their yard and their children, and we don’t want to facilitate any of that.
10. We’re already doing enough. We are doing so much already, helping this other neighbor and volunteering at church and with that justice reform group that meets on Sunday afternoon. We can’t imagine taking on one more cause or problem.

That’s a boatload of reasons not to help! Most of us have experienced those feelings sometimes, when presented with a potential “helping” situation.

It’s interesting to me, though, that even though we know the truth of those responses, many of us will, in fact, decide to help someone else, a fair amount of the time. Over the last few weeks, as I’ve asked you about this scenario, you’ve shared tales with me that demonstrate there are lots of times when you do help.

Pam described a friend who totally took advantage of her, at one point, even to the point of stealing from her to support his drug habit. It took a blow-up with him for her to realize what was happening, but even so she didn’t cut this friend out of her life. Remarkably, they remain in what she calls a “weird kind of loving (yet guarded, on my part) relationship,” five years later.

Linda described being pulled over by a police officer who was waving at her from the curb. She admits her first thought was “He must need help.” So she stopped! (It turns out he gave her a ticket!) She’s a good-hearted, friendly person, so it didn’t occur to her not to stop to help that stranger even if he was a cop!

Rita shared a poignant story of a time she was driving home alone after the Christmas Eve service, and she stopped to offer a ride to a couple of strangers. It was a dark, cold night and she was worried about their safety as they walked down that steep hill where her car, among others, were sliding a bit. “After I managed to come to a stop for them, and they accepted my offer,” she says, “I noticed that the woman was very pregnant. They both got in the back seat of my van,” and they proceeded to chat for the short distance these strangers needed to go. Rita didn’t get their names, but she reflects that it felt like she gave a ride to Mary and Joseph, that special Christmas night.

I’m certain that if I polled practically any of you who are reading this post, you’d be able to recount stories of times when you helped a stranger. It might have been money; it might have been time. Like my husband’s story of the woman who plopped herself into the passenger seat decades ago when his (unlocked!) car was stopped for a red light. He ended up giving her a ride to where she was going, and even went back for her later, because she asked him to. We help one another, in spite of the long list of reasons we don’t want to.

And sometimes we get burned. We’ll have someone who takes and takes and takes, and then “ghosts” us, as Sharelle reported, cutting off all contact when a longer-term relationship had been anticipated. Those things I listed above really do happen, where their problem becomes our problem, and we begin to get enmeshed in their drama.

So why do we do it? Why do we help, when there are so many good reasons not to?

Well, first, we evidently aren’t satisfied with our own excuses for not helping. That must be true–because we decide, again and again, to help in one way or another. There must be something in us, or in our human condition, that keeps those reasons I enumerated above from barricading us behind doors of self-righteousness and disregard. That doesn’t mean we won’t sometimes rely on those reasons not to help. But few of us will stay there consistently.

Second, the Bible tells us so. Jesus calls us to love our neighbor. He describes the Good Samaritan who lives out uncommon care for a stranger (Luke 10.25-37), and he reminds us that when we serve “the least of these,” we will meet him (Matthew 25.31-46). That truth permeates the Bible, with the wisdom of doing unto others what we want them to do to us (Matthew 7.12).

Outside the gospels, there are many harsh words for those who repeatedly ignore the needs of those around them. James says:

If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

James 2.15-17

And the writer of First John:

How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

1 John 3.17

Our willingness to stretch out of our comfort zones and personal convenience in order to help one another is deeply grounded in our faith and our reading of Scripture, and the teachings of the church.

Third, we have sometimes been that stranger, and we’ve been blessed by the support and care of someone who stretched in that way to help us. Whether or not we have religious commitments, many of us will speak of “paying it forward,” offering a leg up in the same way a stranger once helped us. You don’t have to be religious to feel gratitude and believe in the value of encouraging and empowering other human beings.

Finally, this is what decent people do. Civilization calls for some level of mutual care. And–notwithstanding some of what we are seeing in this age of Coronavirus–we want to live in a decent world. Leaving one another out in the cold, unnecessarily, feels like it’s beneath us. As Seth Godin often says, “people like us do things like this.” We take some risks–we go against some of the “Ten Reasons” I enumerated above–because we want to live in a world where people behave kindly toward one another.

If you have other reasons not to help, or answers to why we help anyway, I hope you’ll share them in the comments or by e-mail. I write about this whole subject in Foolish Church (especially in chapter 4), and we’ll talk about it more in this blog. There’s much more to say about how good boundaries can make both our “no” and our “yes” more healthy and life-giving for us and for the other person. In the meantime, I invite you to notice where you say those “yesses” and “no’s,” and why. Let’s keep up the conversation.

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash