My Brother's Keeper | Spoken Word

Sixteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine pondered a timeless question: How do we decide whom we are to aid? He wrote, “Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special [attention] to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.”

His counsel remains just as relevant today. Each of us has opportunity—even responsibility—to pay special attention to those who are brought into connection with us.

Connection is a word we hear often today. Yet even as technology links the world more closely than ever, nothing can replace the value of one human being noticing and doing good for another.

In many ways, a human being is like a flower. When a flower receives the right amount of light, air, and nutrients, it opens and blossoms, revealing its beauty. But without those favorable elements, it closes its petals to protect itself, hiding its natural beauty. Likewise, we each need the light, air, and nutrients of human love, friendship, acceptance, and belonging—nutrients that allow us to open, to flourish, and to fully blossom.

One way we receive these nutrients, these warm feelings in our hearts, is by offering them to others. The New Testament reads: “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for [the[our] brethren. But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.”

May we each, as a beloved hymn pleads, “be [our] brother’s keeper.” May we show “gentle heart[s]” to those whose “sorrow[s]” our “eye[s] can’t see”—to the “wounded,” to the “weary.”

May we do our part to help the light of Jesus Christ shine brightly for others, healing and helping the human flowers in the fields of life surrounding us to blossom. As we do so, we will find the light of His love growing within us. For Jesus Christ is a light that is endless, a light that can never be darkened.