Limits of Charity?

[Leprous_Soul]

I am a poor Catholic and not a superlative human being, either, so I do question my judgement in every area on a regular basis. Therefore, I have come to all of you with a dilemma. I have been helping a grandmother and her grandchild for several months now with basic needs such as food and medicine. But I am stretched very thin myself financially now and am facing the prospect of continuing in my higher education or taking that money, giving it to them instead and dropping out of school. The rub is that I will probably also wind up needing to augment my own mother’s small retirement funds soon and what I make when I am finished with school will probably partly have to go in that direction. I know that the grandmother and grandchild will be in hardship if I don’t help them anymore and yet I do not know what will become of my own mother if I do not work to finish my education and help her. Insights would be appreciated.

 

[Alterum]

Are there charity organizations that would be willing to help these people you are so generously supporting? Have you gone to the local Catholic Church?

I will pray for you

 

[Lisa4Catholics]

I agree, go to the Church and explain the situation.See if they have a St.Vincent DePaul Society active.You need to pray and ask God for help,because your grandmom and her grandchild you know will sink if you don’t help them and your mom might sink if you don’t finnish school.God will send you help,I will pray for you as well.God Bless

 

[Catholic_Mike]

I hope you can find other charitable people to help…

This is quite a long shot, but another thing you might do is make sure that they are getting all the help they are entitled to from the government. Food stamps, social security or SSI, medicare, etc. Sometimes it seems that people don’t know what’s available to them - or sometimes tangles develop in all the red tape and it never gets to them. If they are having problems, a call to your state rep/senator might at least get some information collected so everyone knows what’s going on. I realize this isn’t a great suggestion, but it’s another avenue you can try.

 

[jrabs]

Maybe if you talk to your parish, they may be able to help out by asking for donations. Maybe they can run a small announcement in the weekly bulletin.