The Widow Indeed

First Timothy chapter 5 teaches about the local church’s responsibility toward widows. There it defines a “widow indeed” who is elderly, faithful to God, and has no other living relative who can care for her. I have never know a widow who was truely alone…until recently. Our little country church has several widows; all of whom have some family member living nearby, except one. Maria is in her 80’s and has outlived her husband, her siblings, and even her own children. I think that she may have some distant nieces or nephews but they are unbelievers and have shown little interest in caring, or even maintaining family relations with Maria.

On Lord’s Day afternoons, the men of our assembly have been gathering to study the letter of 1st Timothy. When we came to read chapter 5 verses 3-10, we become convicted that, we, as an assembly of followers of Jesus Christ have a responsibility toward this widow indeed. It was pointed out that, through some government program, she supposedly receives a small stipend (however, the government is known to neglect its payments for months at a time!). This knowledge only convicted the brothers even more when a younger brother proclaimed, “The government is doing more than the church! This is to our shame.”

Over the past couple of weeks, the church has gone out to inspect her house for needed repair and maintenance. Also, we are looking at putting up a fence to keep her chickens in an enclosed space 1) to keep the varments out, and 2) so that she doesn’t have to wander as far to tend to them. The Quichua in this area are a hard-working people and Maria is no exception. She still walks the half a kilometer to attend every meeting. The congregation as a whole agreed to restock her dwindling chicken population by giving her 10 chickens to tend so that she could remain active, yet not over-worked.

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I was discussing this with a friend recently, and we started to ponder how life and society would be different if the church, as a whole, took care of these sort of “practical” ministries. Even though I don’t see it being the church’s responsibility to bring physical and economical prosperity to the world at large, I do see that the church has a calling to care for (physically as well as spiritually) the poor, the widows, the orphans, the destitude, etc. Today, governments run most of these social programs, but my friend and I see in the scrpitures where the church should be leading in this area. Was it not faithful believers who taught the world that these “undesireables” are still human beings and should be valued? When did the church release this responisbility to the governments of the world? While we cannot go back in time, we can open the Word of God and allow it to convict us to obey it without excuse.

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