Those with food insecurities. . .

Listening to a radio ad for a local and very effective charity providing hot meals to anyone in need in the community, I heard for the first time the hungry labeled those with food insecurities.  I suppose it is the proper and politically correct thing to say about the, well, hungry in our community but it is a sterile and impotent description.  It will hardly drive the compassion of those who could help and it turns hunger into a feeling instead of a real bodily need.  For what it is worth, I despise the way we come up with new ways not to offend.  The inoffensive terms have no power to draw us out of ourselves and sacrifice for the sake of others.  Furthermore, they treat a real problem as if it were some sort of administrative inefficiency instead of hunger.  We all know what hunger is.  I do not have a clue what they mean by food insecurity.  Food insecurity will not move my cold heart to offer up an online gift for their work.  Furthermore, they do not offer the food insecure security.  They offer them food.  One meal a day (except on Sundays).  So how is that security?  It is a bandaid.  Now, mind you, it is a valuable one and God bless them for doing it but it is not security for the insecure.  It is a plate of good food, mostly homemade, nutritious, and, most of all, free to all who come (to my knowledge there is no litmus test at the door).  However, if the people who are hungry had to define the term food insecurity no one would ever eat.

Jesus does not diminish those who are hungry or blind or deaf or mute or lame when He uses those terms.  They are meant to be pointed.  God did not intend for us to suffer any need.  Even the barest words of Genesis prior to the Fall tell us this.  It was all good.  Man was fully satisfied (except for the devil who capitalized upon a yearning to be God which Adam and Eve had not even realized until the question came).  We are not urged to care for those differently abled or those with food insecurity or those with vision impairment or those with hearing impairment or whatever, we are called to recognize our own gift in order to assist the need in others.  Imagine if we called it a clothing insecurity or a housing insecurity.  Neither of those terms means anything anymore than the invented ways we come up with to normalize want or need.  That is the point of Jesus' words.  The need is not normal -- it is rampant but not normal so do what you can where you can to help.  Saying the poor you will always have with you does not mean you free to ignore them or ignore their need.  It is the removal of the idea that you can fix society's ills.  What you can do and what you should do is help your neighbor in need.

What these terms have done is to elevate advocacy over real help.  Assisting those with food insecurity could be done with a highly paid lobbyist in state or national legislatures.  But it would not put food in their mouths.  What they need is not an administrative problem but a neighbor with a big heart.  Food insecurity may be a national problem but hunger is always local -- looking into the face of the hungry and God moving your heart to care and act.  Jesus was inviting to see these needs not as an administrative problem but as a local and personal opportunity to love one another as we have been loved by Him.  That is why for the Christian the food is part of the gift and the Gospel is the other.