A Special Kind Of Do-Gooder

A Syracuse University Professor has written a book called “How You Can Help: An Easy Guide To Doing Good Deeds In Your Everyday Life.” He had planned to call the book “A Guide For the Genuine Do-Gooder.” But a friend, who spends much of her time and money trying to help the unfortunate, told him she liked the idea of the book but not the proposed title. “No one wants to be called a do-gooder,” she said.

Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines a Do-Gooder as “an earnest, usually impractical, and often naive and ineffectual humanitarian reformer.” Wrong! Jesus was neither impractical, nor naive, nor ineffectual. And Jesus was a “Do-Gooder” — par excellence — a fact attested to over-and-over again by the New Testament writers.

An eighth grade English teacher liked to inject big words into his lectures, hoping to stimulate his students’ curiosity about their meaning. Responding to the challenge, a student interrupted a lecture to ask the teacher to explain the meaning of the…