As I write these words, I am haunted by two scenes that came to me today—one by way of the international press, the other by private email. First, there is the picture of a dead migrant child, cradled in the arms of a Turkish soldier who scooped up the child’s body, a casualty of the terrible migrant crisis sweeping across Europe. Second, a dear friend in Russia shared her anguish with me concerning a mutual friend Irina who lies mortally ill in a Russian hospital in great need—including a need for healthy food! The food available to Irina is so wretched my friend has resorted to ordering food to be shipped to Irina from Finland. My friend is herself in virtual poverty by Western standards, but she does what she can for her desperate friend.

Given the volume and velocity of sad news these days, what ever are we to do? Are we in danger of becoming so accustomed to universal human suffering that we find ourselves becoming callous and overwhelmed, or do we instead reaffirm our essential common humanity and resolve to act with compassion?

What strikes me most is the obvious humanity of people in crisis. Their longing for life and hope and happiness looks amazingly like mine. These people are not other. They are we. The only difference is that they just happen to be in a different location and circumstance. It is one that could easily be our own.

Few words in America’s founding documents are more familiar than those initial sentences in the Declaration of Independence that declare that it is “self-evident” that “all” people (not just a few) “are created equal,” and that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

One need not be an American or a Christian to see the essential insight in these bold words. The longing to live and be free is evident every day in the desperate acts, small and large, that people perform as they pursue a better life. The hunger for life and liberty make perfect sense, but what about the right to pursue “happiness”? Do people really have a right to “happiness”? “I never promised you a rose garden,” the country song goes. Were the Founding Fathers speaking nonsense in their claim that we have a “right” to pursue “happiness”?

If you unpack the historic meaning of the words happy and happiness, the Founding Fathers may not have been as irrational or starry-eyed as one might think. There is a biblical idea behind the English words happy and happiness that explains what the Declaration was asserting. For example, Jesus says, “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them” (John 13:17, King James Version). Happy in this instance has nothing to do with sensuous pleasure or material prosperity. Rather, it means contented, flourishing, healthy, or “blessed.”

Jefferson and the architects of the American experiment did not assert everyone’s right to be perpetually cheerful or prosperous, but they were declaring that governments ought not to stand in the way of the fundamental human quest for contentment and wellbeing. Life can be cruel and hard. No government should add to the natural burdens humans inevitably experience. Refugees of war and people wasting away in hospitals deserve to be treated with dignity. They deserve life, liberty, and the opportunity to seek wholeness and “blessedness.” Christians, above all people, should own their obligation to assist this quest wherever they can.

There are days when the news is unbearably sad. On these days “happiness” seems like a fleeting mirage. Yet the Bible assures us that a deep kind of happiness is possible if we live faithfully and lovingly, and imitate Christ. This means we will become channels of grace to others through the practice of a radical hospitality:

Be hospitable to one another without complaining. Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received. (1 Pet 4:9-10)

There will be fewer starving, dying fellow creatures if we take Peter’s words to heart. Grace comes in many ways; but most often it comes, I think, through the agency of human hearts touched with compassion. All of us must search our hearts and find ways to be Christ to the stranger, the homeless, the refugee, the migrant, the sick, the imprisoned, and the destitute (Matt 25:31-46).

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Header image: Lamnatos, Antonis. One Lost Step. March 20, 2011. Nea Artaki, Thessaly and Continental Greece. Retrieved from flickr.com. Some rights reserved.