On a recent blog, the following comment was made:

Feeding your own children is good, but not as good as feeding the same number of children who aren't related to you.

While this may, on the surface, sound like a truism, I'd like to address this from the point of view of one whose father lived out that philosophy.

At 16 years old, my childhood journey of being shuttled about between divorced parents and foster homes was through. I would spend the remainder of my childhood years in a foster home, because I refused to return to the home where physical abuse and constant belittling were a virtual certainty.

My father was finishing off as a seminary student, and, within the next year would begin his career as professional clergy. A champion of peace and justice, his eyes were constantly focused on the suffering of children in third world countries rather than his own children's needs at home. As a result, his wife, my stepmother, a woman who was a mere 10 years older than her oldest stepson, was left to handle the burden of three adolescent children whose lives had been ravaged by abuse and instability, as well as attempt to raise three of her own.

While I left my parents' home, I would spend the next 17 years in a futile attempt to salvage a relationship with the man I both adored and loathed. And every time I had a need, the needs of some anonymous child in a banana republic would come before mine. When I made a mistake at 18 that sent me to jail, my father did not once come to visit or to see how I was doing, and I spent the next three years on probation basically a stranger in a strange land, with no family for support. When I was arrested, he was in Nicaragua, demonstrating his compassion for all of his good Christian friends.

When I spent the weekend in the hospital almost a dozen years ago concerned about chest pains and fatigue (an irregular heartbeat was discovered), my dad, a mere 200 miles away at the time, would not make the trip to check on my welfare.

And the seasons passed by. While my father did, on occasion, come up to see us, birthdays passed, both mine and those of my children, without his bothering to be a part. And through all of it, he kept up appearances, and the children of third world countries were always important.

I've healed from those past hurts. Some years back I realized that for my own emotional health, I needed to break off my relationship with my father once and for all. But I still have that hole, that hole that should have and could have been filled by a man whose compassion for anonymous children in faraway countries was as endless as his contempt for the children he sired.

It is good, and proper to look out for the needs of the less fortunate. But we should never think that doing so while neglecting our own children is a noble or proper cause. Or else we are, in essence, creating children that some other person needs to look out for, and continuing the problem. If one really feels the need to focus so strongly on the needs of the children of the third world, it is probably best, then, if they have none of their own.