Widows and Advocates

Yesterday, I was attempting to help three widows and two soon to be widows work through the VA maze one must navigate in order to get the pension they deserve.  Today we expect that widows are taken care of by government programs and many are receiving needed help.  But many others are facing hurdles from the very agencies that ought to be helping them.

In each of the cases I was working on, instead of looking into the widows' circumstances to see what is going on, the mammoth bureaucracy simply noted that they didn't fit into the required cookie-cutter design and denied them the assistance their spouses had earned in service to our country.

It wasn't that anyone was out to get them or had designs on increasing the difficulties of their already increasingly difficult lives, it was simply that they were without voices and could not be heard by bureaucrats who had no personal knowledge of them.  Theses widows needed an advocate able to speak for them.

This very situation occurred in the earliest days of the Christian community when the church in Jerusalem was found guilty of ignoring a large population of widows who should have been provided for by Christ's followers:

"In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenistic Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food" (Acts 6:1).

The leadership responded by asking the church to choosing men from among themselves to serve as deacons to insure that the distribution was made in a fair and equitable way (see vv. 2-4).  What they did, in effect, was to establish a group of advocates that would speak for the widows, insuring they were no longer overlooked.

I wonder how many other widows today, besides the widows of veterans, are out there not being heard by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.?  How many widows do you suppose really need an advocate to give them voice?  And I wonder how we in the church could become advocates for them?

Considering "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world" (Js 1:27), perhaps we ought to make finding out a priority.  Jus' Say'n.