Jesus and Poverty

Walking down the street

Homeless guy

Sitting on the street

Only wants a meal

Someone to talk to

But we ignore him

We walk faster past him

We keep our eyes averted away from him.

A different street

A different day

A different person

Same situation

They’re sitting on the street

We ignore them

We don’t have the time

We don’t know what they’re situation is

“What would they do with my money?”

Is what we think

They’re there

We can’t ignore them

The homeless are people too

Maybe they once had a job

And a home

A family who cared

You don’t know their story

Maybe we should take the time to listen

There are plenty of times that

We have nothing to do

Go out

Show the same kindness that

Jesus showed

Listen

Give hope.

When you listen

You give hope

When you give hope

You are fighting

The injustice of poverty

I wrote this in class this morning. Our speaker, Barry, was talking about Jesus and poverty. It occurred to me that we have it all wrong. We don’t always have to do great things to fight poverty. People who have fallen into poverty just need someone to give them a hand. That hand is hope. If we have Jesus, then we have an abundance of hope. Why not share it with someone?

We always want to be more like Jesus, so we try to be “good people.” We avoid certain types of people, but if we look at the life of Jesus, he was hanging out with the exact same people that we try to avoid. So if we want to be more like Jesus, hang out with the “bad crowd,” with the homeless, with the people that have a not-so-good reputation.