As a church we regularly get messages through social media channels from people we do not know asking for help. Many claim to be from Africa or India, while some of them like the one below is from the Middle East. All of them are reaching out for sponsorship, visas, donations and other such things. I assume this works because if you reach out to enough people, eventually someone will respond. Here’s a message we received today, see what you think.

My beloved brothers, please listen to us. I felt frustrated after I wrote to more than 20 churches and did not find a response on the level of our tragedy. It is life or death for me and my family. May God bless you.

My brother, I am from Syria, I am 40, I have 5 children and my wife. We were Muslims, but after what we saw of the actions of Islam, we searched for a better religion, so we embraced the Christian religion, the religion of love and peace that all human beings desire, but when our matter was revealed, we were exposed to the worst things, and I was forced to flee so that I would not be killed on charges of abandoning Islam, and we want your help in escaping from Syria if you can help us.

Please save us. I hope you will give us a video call to reassure my children and make them feel that they are not alone. May God bless you. My fellow believers, I hope in the beginning that you would give us a video call to reassure my children of the most important thing, and this is our hope for you.

Please, our people, please do not abandon us. Please, it is life or death for 7 people. Please do not abandon us. May God bless you.

The message above is playing all the cards: life & death, children, persecution, conversion, and playing them with some urgency & intensity. If it was true and I have no good way of knowing if it is or not, I’d still have no idea what to do with this. All we would likely be left with is helplessness, guilt and frustration.

Our basic assumption towards most of these messages is that they are spam, maybe that would be yours too. We have become so used to people using whatever means they can to trick, deceive, defraud people by trying to play on their compassion, faith, gullibility, naivety and so on.

And yet that creates a problem of its own. As a Christian I am after all supposed to be compassionate towards the persecuted, the convert, the poor and the family seeking safety. But I can no longer tell who is genuine and who is not. I rarely consider myself to have the time & energy to help the people I do know and almost zero to work out the difference amongst people I do not. There is no margin for the genuine stranger in need and a deep suspicion they they are probably a chancer.

There is a significant difference between the email cry for help and the wounded man on the road to Jericho (read this wonderful example of a modern day good samaritan). I cannot tell, I cannot help, my options are limited and my fear of an ambush is absolutely sky high. And so I do, what I suspect many of us would do, I keep on walking. Ignore the email, and crack on with your day.

But I worry about what this does to my heart when I do come across someone who I could help. I think the more I get the same begging cards on the underground (which are clearly false), the more emails & messages I get the harder my heart becomes. I’m likely to treat everybody as a fraud, a cheat. The walls around my heart are getting thicker & higher.

It’s not surprising then that many prefer to give their money to those in need through an organisation that they have had recommended to them or that they believe to be trustworthy and in many ways this is fine. But still I delegate compassion out, I remove myself from the front line and each time I take steps towards the back. Over time I can cut those amounts without consequence to me.

There are no easy answers here. The internet and social media has given everyone greater access to people, the genuine and the fake, the person in need as well as the cheat so I have no expectations of these messages somehow just stopping one day.

But if I don’t find a way to guard my heart not just from the cheat but from the hardness that comes from dealing with the cheat then almost inevitably the arteries of compassion will clog in my heart and I’m not sure I want that to happen.

Thoughts?