What you’re hoping is that your help represents the point at which the person’s past good actions are beginning to bear fruit, and the past bad actions are beginning to end their influence. This is perfectly praiseworthy.

 "First, kamma: When someone is suffering, you have to reflect on the reasons why people suffer.

Here we have to correct a common misunderstanding about kamma. The Buddha didn’t say that our present suffering comes entirely from our past actions. In fact, he actually said that to believe that what you experience now depends solely on past actions is an extreme form of wrong view. He took this point so seriously that — even though he wasn’t the sort of person to look for fights — when he heard that other people were teaching this view, he sought them out to argue with them. If you teach that everything depends on past kamma, he said, it leaves your students unprotected and bewildered, for it leaves them with no way of escaping from suffering in the present.

One case involved some Jain ascetics: They claimed that by engaging in extreme asceticism, they were burning off the pains caused by their past bad kamma. So he asked them: “Have you noticed that when you don’t engage in asceticism, you don’t feel those intense pains?”

They answered, “Yes.”

“So how can you say that the pain comes from past action? It comes from what you’re doing right now.”

The Buddha’s actual teaching on kamma is that the pleasures and pains you experience come from a combination of two things: your past actions and your present actions. In fact, your present actions are the more important of the two. Past actions provide the raw material from which your present actions shape what you actually experience right now as pleasure or pain.

So when people are suffering in the present moment, the causes come down to two: unskillful actions in the past, or unskillful actions in the present. They either did something harmful in the past, or they’re doing something harmful now — either to others, in mistreating them, or to themselves, in how they engage in the three types of fabrication in the present: bodily, verbal, and mental.

If a person is suffering from the results of past bad actions, and you would like to help the person in an external way, what you’re hoping is that your help represents the point at which the person’s past good actions are beginning to bear fruit, and the past bad actions are beginning to end their influence. This is perfectly praiseworthy, and if you can succeed in helping to improve the external situation, it’s all to the good. But there are times when the person’s past bad kamma is still strong. That’s when you have to focus on the person’s present kamma, and in particular, on the way the person fabricates his or her own experience."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sublime Determinations: a Retreat on the Brahmavihāras with the Sociedade Vipassana de Meditação BrasÍlia"