Others, Lord, Yes Others
Learning to stop asking who deserves help – and give anyway.
“Others, Lord, yes others, let this my motto be; help me to live for others, that I may live like thee.”
Again, the preacher repeated this phrase. I leaned forward, listening intently, my sweat-soaked Sunday shirt peeling itself away from the straight-backed oak pew. There was no air conditioner and few fans in the old church building, and the hot summer Sunday morning grew stuffy as the traveling minister’s sermon rolled past hour one and into hour two.
As uncomfortable as I was, I listened with earnest. At sixteen years old I’d recommitted my life to living out the Christian faith. This message gave me something I could sink my teeth into. Something deep in my soul resonated—this was the way of Christ, living to help others instead of helping myself.
—
At nearly forty I am beginning to look for things that really add value to my life—energy expenditures that will bring long-lasting meaning. I’m a little less captured by the glitter and flash that distracted me in my twenties (a little, but not completely). Helping to birth and raise four children is certainly sobering. Although I try to hold onto little things just for me, my life is more and more absorbed with my children and their needs.
I think because of this I am more attentive to the human condition in general. I’ve shed many tears for life lost, even for people I never knew. I feel things deeper. It’s as if I am more connected to the human condition. Perhaps this is what it means to grow up—to mature.
Part of this attentiveness to the needs of others was taught to me by my father in my early childhood.
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At the age of seven I was coming out of the grocery store with my father when we encountered a man sitting on the sidewalk just outside the sliding glass doors. He was overweight, wearing compression socks and sandals, dirty from a life on the street. He sat sprawled, his back against the brick exterior of the Winn-Dixie. It was a hot summer night in Florida, and his shirt was unbuttoned, revealing beads of sweat on his sunburned skin.
“How ya doin’, son?” he asked. “Can you spare an old man a quarter?”
My dad came up behind me and offered the man some money and a cold soda. The man smiled and put down his cardboard sign to take the gift. “VIETNAM VETERAN,” written in all caps, was all that the sign said.
My dad, being as he is, picked up a lengthy conversation with him as I paced back and forth on the curb. Suddenly, I heard my dad yell to someone in the store, “Call 9-1-1!”
The man had slumped over, in pain, breathing heavily. The paramedics arrived quickly. They pulled open the front of his shirt and attached wires to his chest. The last thing I remember was them loading him onto a stretcher and into the ambulance.
This was my first encounter with a beggar. I was glad my dad was there to help him.
—
Through my twenties I developed a judgmental attitude toward panhandlers and those in need. “They are probably professional con artists,” I would think to myself. I kept a straight face whenever I saw someone helplessly standing at a stoplight, staring at me through my window.
This conditioning was mostly due to things I would hear at church: “Don’t give them money, they will just buy beer and drugs with it.”
I will never forget a conversation I had with one of my younger brothers about five years ago. He had just spent several years in the restaurant industry and most of his free time in the downtown nightlife.
“Maybe the best thing you can do for people like that,” he said, “is to buy them beer and cigarettes. They are going to buy them anyway. If you give them a six-pack or a pack of smokes they won’t feel like you’re judging them. You would definitely be the brightest spot in their day.”
This idea really stuck with me. What!? I thought to myself. This is either profound or extremely foolish.
To this day I don’t know how I feel about such a gesture, but that single conversation began to work a change in my heart about how I viewed others in need. It humanized them. I began to see others not as good or bad, saved or sinner, but as humans. I remembered those early memories of my dad helping others. I remembered the evangelist’s sermon about helping others the way Jesus did.
My worldview began to change.
—
About six months ago I saw a woman at the gas pump who I knew from previous encounters. She has addiction problems and is on the hard stuff. I’d just seen her come out of 7-Eleven, having spent her only twenty dollars on cigarettes and lottery tickets. Now she was sitting at the pump, frustrated, typing on her phone.
I could overhear enough of her conversation with herself to realize that she had an empty gas tank and was texting friends to ask for a PayPal transfer so she could get gas.
Yes, that’s right. She bought her cigs and lottery tickets before getting gas, and now she had no money for gas.
Remembering my brother’s admonition, I decided to refrain from judgment and offered to help her. She smiled—it may have been the only smile she’d had that day.
Worth it? But she won’t learn her lesson! You’re feeding her dependency!
Maybe. But at the time I thought it was the right thing to do.
—
I made a friend recently—a young man not much younger than myself. He’s in between jobs. Getting to work when he finds it is difficult because he doesn’t have money for gas. Hell, he doesn’t have money for food some days.
The other day I stopped by his house and rolled down the window. “Catch!” I said as I threw a frozen pizza out the window like a frisbee. Ear-to-ear smile. “Heck ya, brother!” he shouted in gratitude.
There is a name for this way of living—living to fulfill the needs of others, no matter how small. In fact, this behavior is a long-standing Christian tradition and practice that early church leaders wrote about as essential to living out the faith. It’s called alms.
Alms is defined as the practice of bestowing charity or the gratuitous giving of money, food, or clothing to relieve the suffering or needs of the poor or needy.
Now, one could make their head spin, as I did for years, trying to define who deserves or doesn’t deserve alms giving. But I’ve come to believe that this complicates it. It is not for me to judge.
If I have it within my power to make someone’s day brighter—to help someone with a little gas money when they are having trouble—then it is my pleasure to do so.
—
As we draw nearer to the Thanksgiving season, may we always be grateful for the abundant mercies of our Creator, for the hand-ups that others have given to us, and may we pay it forward.
Drew Alexander
“Others, Lord, yes others” is a poem by Charles D. Meigs.
October 22, 2025
