Confronting the Bigness

You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.

-Jesus, John 12:8 NIV

Within hours of reading the text for Sunday, which includes the above comment, I had some poor people sitting in my office asking for help.  Not a surprising event for the pastor of a church.  I know for a fact that they are making the rounds to the local churches trying to get the help they need, and I know they've got big problems, bigger problems than I can fix.

What I try to do is find out how to help, without just shoving some cash in their hand and sending them on their way.  In this case, we could pay for a couple nights in a motel, to postpone homelessness.  I can maybe point them in the direction of agencies that have the resources to help them, but I have no idea if they will truly qualify or if they will even follow through.  I have no idea if they're telling me the truth.  I have no idea if their situation is as dire as it sounds, or if their efforts to pull themselves up are in earnest.

But they are pretty surely poor, and pretty surely down on their luck, and pretty likely to stay that way.

We gave them two days.  Depending on your point of view, it's either just a drop in a dry well, or just enough to see them through the desert, they seemed to think the latter.

Confronting poverty is a discouraging experience, even when you can help a little, you never feel like you've really done any good, because the problem is quite simply enormous.

When Jesus said, "you will always have the poor among you," he knew what he was saying.  The world is just like that, the reality of limited resources mingles with bad luck and bad decisions, and stirs around in societal and economic systems and some people always seem to get drowned in the stormy seas.

I wish I had one of those "silver and gold I have none, but what I have I give to you," moments where I could just fix the problem, but I didn't.  I just paid their motel bill until Thursday, and I will pray for them.

Even if I gave them all the money in the Good Samaritan Fund, they'd still be poor, they'd still be on the bottom of the whirlpool with the weight of inequity and generations of poverty pressing them down.

Maybe they were grifters, maybe they were taking advantage of the charity of the church, maybe they will just move on down the street and repeat their story and someone else will give them some more.

So be it.

They are the poor, honest or not.  They may not be noble, but they will always be with us.

My only hope and prayer is that, in some way, I faithfully represented Christ to them.  Maybe the other churches they visit will do the same.  Maybe through all those people being a little like Jesus, they will make it through another week of hard times.