Past Your Own Front Door

In December of 1938, a young British stockbroker named Nicholas Winton had his skiing trip in Switzerland canceled. On a whim, he decided to visit a friend in Prague instead.

He wasn't looking for a cause. He had a good job, a comfortable life in London, and no particular reason to get involved in anything happening in Czechoslovakia. But when he arrived, he found refugee camps overflowing with Jewish families who had fled their homes due to Nazi expansion and children, thousands of them, whose parents knew what was coming and had nowhere to send them.

Winton could have gone home. It wasn't his country. It wasn't his problem. He had a return ticket and a desk waiting for him in London.

Instead, he set up a makeshift office in his hotel room and started making lists. He spent his vacation, and then his evenings after work back in London, hunting down foster families, forging bureaucratic paperwork, and raising money he didn't have. Over the following months, he organized eight trains that carried 669 children out of Czechoslovakia to safety in Britain. A ninth train, carrying 250 more children, was scheduled to leave on September 3, 1939 — the day Germany invaded Poland and the borders slammed shut. Winton never found those children. He carried that loss the rest of his life.

He never told anyone. Not his wife, not his friends. For fifty years, the story sat in a scrapbook in his attic until his wife found it in 1988. Winton wasn't trying to build a reputation. He just couldn't unsee what he'd seen, and he couldn't talk himself into believing it wasn't his responsibility.

That's the tension most of us live in every day. We've got enough on our plate — our own bills, our own kids, our own deadlines, our own version of "surviving the week." It's tempting to build a fence around our lives and call the space inside it our whole responsibility. Mind your own business. Handle your own house. That's plenty. Thats cute, and that's false.

God never called us to just be light for our own household.

"Give justice to the poor and the orphan; uphold the rights of the oppressed and the destitute. Rescue the poor and helpful; deliver them from the grasp of evil people." (Psalm 82: 3-4) 

Notice who God is talking to in that Psalm. It's not addressed to kings or armies. It's a command to anyone who has the ability to act and is tempted not to. Rescue. Deliver. Uphold. Those are verbs, not feelings.

We weren't made small. We were made in the image of the One who spoke oceans and mountains into existence — the One whose concern has never once stopped at a border, a zip code, or a comfort zone. If we're carrying His image, our concern shouldn't stop there either. He didn't design us to be the light of our little household. He designed us to be light of the world — which means somewhere out past our own front door, there are bridges that don't exist, wells that haven't been dug, and kids who can't get to school for six months out of the year because the river rises and there's no way across.

I've seen that river. Next February, our team is headed back to Honduras with Mission Lazarus to build two bridges, dig a well, and install a full water distribution system for a community that needs all three. It's the biggest project we've taken on in over a decade of doing this work in Honduras, and it's not something we can do by minding our own business and hoping someone else handles it.

Winton didn't have any of the systems in place either. He just started making lists. His philosophy in life was "If something is not impossible, then there must be a way to to do it." And if the tomb is empty, anything is possible.

Where has "not my problem" become your default answer to a need you're fully capable of doing something about?

Pick one need beyond your own household this week — in your neighborhood or somewhere further out — and do something small but real about it. Don't wait until it's convenient.

You are made in God's image — an image too big to stay small. Don't build a fence around your responsibility and called it wisdom. Seek eyes for the needs outside your own walls, and the courage to act like they're yours to carry.

If today's message stirred something in you, here's a tangible way to act on it. Our team is raising $120,000 for our project in Honduras this February. Every dollar goes straight into the work — and every person who gives is just as much a part of this team as those of us who go.

Here's the link to donate to the trip:
https://www.missionlazarus.org/?form=FUNQTFPHRGC

Thank you for being willing to look past your own front door.