You may have an army of bleeding hearts tending the sorrowful and the hungry and yet not see an end to the causes of hunger and thirst. --Melba Maggay, Filipina theologian

No question, I'm a bleeding heart. I feel hugely guilty about how good and easy my life is on a global scale. When I become aware of how rotten life is for someone else, I quickly give up something so they have enough and so I don't feel guilty. I've baked bread for area hot meal programs, gathered volunteers to sort gloves and hats so people can be warm, given out three-day supplies of groceries from the local food pantry, housed people overnight and put more than change in my church offering that goes to hungry people. All of these are necessary, charitable fixes that make my bleeding heart feel better and remind me how generous I am. But they are each temporary. They improve someone's life for just a little while. They depend on my gut feelings and mostly make me feel better.

But they don't change the structural reasons why a person is hungry or cold or doesn't have a place to live. Recently I've been aware of this problem with our current health care system. When Mennonites began work on providing information about the current state of health insurance in the United States and the bills before Congress, we gave the statistic that because of lack of health insurance, 18,000 people die each year in our country of amazing medical research and technology. (<http://www.mennoniteusa.org/Home/Members/HealthcareAccess/tabid/73/Default.aspx>, right-hand column, click on 'see the script')

Soon after our phone calls, new statistics came out: actually 45,000 people die annually in the United States because of lack of health care. <http://pnhp.org/excessdeaths/health-insurance-and-mortality-in-US-adults.pdf>

Gifts from my bleeding heart surplus can't offer life-saving medical care to 45,000 people. Likely, I can't even afford the medical care of one person. The costs are enormous; the structural web complicated.

But I can advocate for just access to medical care for everyone living in the United States. By making phone calls or faxing letters, I can work to change the structure. In the same way, I can take action against systems that don't pay a living wage or make it nearly impossible to immigrate legally. Each of us should be knowledgeably advocating on a regular basis for a structural change that matters to us. Be more than a bleeding heart; be an agent for change!

Many thanks to Cynthia Coyle for creating the heart poster to accompany this article. To download the poster, click on the image or on the following links:

<http://peace.mennolink.org/resources/heartposter.pdf> (color)
<http://peace.mennolink.org/resources/heartposter_bw.pdf> (b&w)