help me help someone else

how can we reach out to different people who we don't currently know or already associate with? how can we reach out to those that have been marginalized by society or who are in need when we don't even realize that they are people in need? i have been trying to figure out a way to find out who in my community is "less fortunate" or who have been marginalized by our society. this kinda sounds like i don't know what i am doing or that i don't know what in the world is going on around me, but i would say the opposite is true. i am very involved in my community and i try to keep in touch with all that goes on around this town-but we don't have what you would see in big cities-homeless people, people asking for money, or anything like that. our community really doesn't have much to help the people who are in need, but our church tries to do what we can.

i just think that jesus gave us the responsibility to reach out to these kinds of people-notice that he reached out to those people when he walked the streets. too often i think we get caught up in so many other things; buildings, programs, music, and whatever else may come our way that we fail to recognize that we need to be reaching for the people that need help. this doesn't mean that we just invite them to our place of worship, or that we just simply give them a little something and say there now we have done our good deed. it is more than that. it is really getting involved to bring about justice for these people, it is to help them get through their rough spot and helping them get on their feet so they can stand by themselves, it is getting dirty and really looking for ways to help-even if they aren't the kinds of things we want to do. there is so much to so to help people plus along the way we need to introduce these people to jesus, and show them how they can have the abundant life and eternal life with him.

we have for too long overlooked these people and depended on the government to help them and do for them-so much so that we now think it is the government's job to do it. but in reality the church should be doing these things-helping these people. there has to be some simple ideas that we can try to get involved in really helping people-being god's hands and feet. would you share some ideas with me??