Mar 25 2010
Who Are The Poor?
When I talk with people about the Christian responsibility to the poor, I usually get two very opposing responses. One person will state that most of the poor around us are poor of their own fault. They are poor because they don’t work hard or manage their lives wisely. Another person will state that people are poor because of the injustices of society and that those in power are keeping others down. I have learned that neither of these accurately portray the state of the poor around us, and that our opposing, yet equally delusional, view of the poor keep us from actually helping them. The truth is the poor are truly poor, not because they don’t have money, but because they don’t have love.
Now I grew up in a very conservative community, so I know half of you out there just cringed at that last sentence, so please bear with me. I have struggled with money. just like almost everyone else. I have even gone through bankruptcy. Once, while walking downtown and indulging in some self-pity, I passed a beggar and thought to myself, “this guy probably has a greater net-worth than I do, he is at zero while I am negative by thousands”. Which was immediately followed by an epiphany, “Wait! This guy has nothing, while I owe thousands… so why am I better off?”
This thought followed me for a while and throughout the next couple years as I picked myself up, moved on, and rebuilt a business from the ground up. Even though I have less money (from a purely mathematical point of view) than a homeless man on the street, I was rich because I had an education, a clear view of my own path, a skill, a craft, an understanding of the world around, and most of all… a family that loved me.
Discovering Poverty
I spend 2 years mentoring kids in the Indianapolis Public School system through a program that identified at-risk youth. The adults I worked with, both the parents of the kids (if they had any) and the volunteers in the program, had a very negative and helpless view of the business world. I was often listening to conversations about how the rich are keeping them down, how they are poor because they are helpless, and how no one will give them a break. I never, of course, shared this point of view, but I began to understand why they had it.
My parents, who run their own small business, raised me with a sense of responsibility, work ethic, fair trade, how to manage business relationships, and some understanding of how the the economy functions. More than education, my family gives me confidence, pride, and the strength of will to stand up for myself while also showing grace to others. When people grow up without families, or even those they can love and trust, they grow up both without a practical education and the internal strength to survive in a truly hard world.
I remember training one young man to get a good job, one of the things I had to teach him was, “Stop calling people ‘sir’. As soon as you call me ‘sir’ you are placing yourself under me. You are my equal, and you have to make sure I know that. Respectfully introduce yourself to someone and then ask for their name if they do not offer it. ” Of course, he learned to call people ‘sir’ from police and school authority figures in his past, who wanted him to be submissive. He was beat down and used to begging people to survive, he did not know he had the power to take relationships into his own hands.
I learned a long time ago that what makes me rich is who I am. No matter how bad the circumstances are at the present, I will always make my way back up. Even when I have nothing, I am rich because I have a real world education, and the strength of will and confidence to make my own way. Those who are truly poor are those who have never been taught how to succeed, have no confidence in their own abilities, and have never had the opportunity to learn a valuable skill or craft. They look at the world, not knowing how those who are well-off got where they are, and feel helpless.
To often in the middle and upper class, we judge the poor from our own standards. We see someone’s behavior and say, “how horrible, I would never do that”. We don’t realize they don’t know what we know, or have experienced what we have, so of course we wouldn’t act like that… they wouldn’t either. We take our understanding for granted, not realizing the world looks so small and so harsh to so many people. No, there is no one out there to blame with “keeping people down”, but we aren’t taking the time to lift them up either.
Helping the Poor
Those who are poor do need help, and we have many poor communities in America that need real charity to heal. People who say, “they just need to get a job”, are blinding themselves to the real need, but those who say, “let’s just give”, are naive to the real problem. What we have in not a poverty of money, but a poverty of love. People aren’t suffering because they lack money, but because they lack development, the kind of development the rest of us get from our families.
When someone grows up in the world without love, they never really grow up. They are children, lost and confused, and looking for answers. In order to heal the hole left in an orphaned heart requires real human charity in the form of time and attention. Yes, the poor need food and shelter, but then they need brothers, sisters, and mentors. Organizations that are most effective in combating poverty in our world are organizations that help people using near one-to-one ratios. In other words, one person can really only help one other person at a time.
One kind of organization I love is the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (http://www.prisonentrepreneurship.org/). This group, along with others like it, equips inmates nearing probation with the tools and knowledge for surviving and thriving in the world of business. They have a recidivism of 10%, which is almost inverse of the average convict’s chances (usually 80%-90% of convicts usually end up back in jail). This proves to me that most of our “criminals” exist because they are put in a place in life where they don’t know how the world works, so they feel helpless and desperate.
Those working at Crisis Pregnancy Centers, another organization I have a lot of respect for, is always happy to receive donations, but can also tell you that what scared pregnant young women most often really need is love and guidance from another dedicated and patient human being. Volunteers are often a more scarce resource than money. Of course, those who have the courage to adopt are probably the best of all of us, and truly covering the darkness of the world with their own love and sacrifice.
People want to feel good by donating money, expecting others to actually handle the problem, but what the whole world really needs is more of us getting our hands dirty. We need to step across the cafeteria line when serving food and actually eat with those on the other side. We need to stop telling people to get jobs, and offer our time to raise up those who lack the skills and understanding to get a job. Society isn’t “keeping people down”, we just aren’t taking the time in our lives to lift up the weak. Poverty, in any given society, is nothing less than the mirror reflection of that society’s own selfishness and hardened hearts.
The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer
