You love to see when someone lives out a great example of what to do for the public.  That can be said of the Duggar family from the show 19 Kids and Counting.  When the EF-5 Tornado hit Joplin, MO, they sprung into action.  NBC reports that they decided to get into a three car caravan and head for Joplin so they could offer assistance.  Several of the older kids in the family have experience as volunteer firefighters and have been trained as first responders.  So they piled in the vehicles and did what they could to help.

The story goes that they worked with search and rescue trying to find survivors in this horrific scene that has played out on our televisions over the last week.  None of us can even imagine what it would be like to stand in such a place and they not only went, but went to work.  The older kids that went helped dig through the rubble and the younger ones passed out much needed supplies.  They didn’t do it for the cameras and the publicity, they did it because it was the right thing to do.  In the end, they did not find any survivors and did find some that had been killed.

The Duggar family has been one that people have looked at with unbelieving eyes, since there are so many kids under the roof at their house.  People gasp when they decide to have another child and look at them disapprovingly because they’ve made a choice to have another.  How many of us would spring into action the way this family did, though?  They said one of the things they want to teach these kids is that they need to have a “ministry mindset” when it comes to helping people.  The article says that they have full intent to go back to Joplin and help even more and let’s face it, those people need a lot of help.

I personally want to tip my hat to them because of what they are doing.  They are simply interested in the good of the people around them.  They are interested in passing on to their kids a love for people and a faith in their God than goes beyond the church pew and into the tornado ravaged streets of Middle America.  The only reason we are hearing about what they are doing is because someone at Good Morning America got wind of it.

This is the example that we need to look to for how to react to a crisis.  Rather than looking at the TV and shaking our heads, we need to get in the game just like this family has.  Who cares that they have so many kids?  If they’re teaching their children to have this kind of compassion and even half of them carry it out, our country could change dramatically just simply because one person decided to love another one and help out when it was needed.