Life on Skid Row

Last weekend my parents and I attended the somewhat conservative church that I was part of for about half of my college career. Many of the faces have changed and it seems to have gotten a little more conservative, but I learned a very important lesson there.

A guy who's getting his Masters of Divinity taught our bible class on Mark 7, and we had some lively discussion about the comments Jesus made to the Syrophoenician woman, etc., etc. Jesus also heals a deaf and mute man and lambastes the Pharisees in this passage; it's classic Jesus.

But at the end of the class time, the teacher made a wonderful speech about how Jesus cared about those who were marginalized in his day, and how we should do the same. And all of a sudden I was blown away by a realization.

I thought that taking care of the poor in real, effective ways was not high on our agenda as The Church because no one was talking about it. Apparently I was wrong. Perhaps it is because people in The Church don't really understand what a huge problem it is, that it is not always a choice, that most of the poor don't WANT to be poor, but are stuck in a cycle of poverty that they do not have the power to break.

Last night in small group a nasty comment was made about the people who chose to stay in New Orleans even after a mandatory evacuation order was issued. It was at that point that I explained that the majority of those people stayed because they didn't have the resources to get out. They couldn't afford bus tickets and they don't own cars. Most of their family members are in the same predicament.

One of the "hurricane refugees" that just stole my heart is an 84-year-old woman named Muriel. She is paralyzed from the waist down because of polio, and spent two and a half days stuck on the freeway, waiting to be rescued. She didn't go to the bathroom all that time because she needs special help to do so. Did she want to be stuck in that situation? Was it her fault that she ended up on a freeway? No, but she doesn't have any family who could help her or the resources to leave, so she had to stay put.

I'm slowly reading a great book called Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, by Ronald Sider, and I'm learning a lot of things I didn't want to know, like the fact that 34,000 children die every day of hunger and preventable diseases in countries all around the world. Sider does a remarkably horrifying job of painting a picture of real poverty outside of America. It's heartbreaking.

I'm told that Tony Campolo used to get up to talk in front of a group of Christians and mention the 34,000 children dying statistic. And then he'd say the word shit. And he'd pause for a second and ask, "Now what bothers you more, the fact that 34,000 children die every day or that I just said shit?"

Good question, Tony.

I was once told that it was great that one of my priorities was caring for the poor, but that didn't have to be EVERY Christian's priority. I disagree. I don't believe fighting abortion or homosexuality was high on Jesus' To Do list, but it's very obvious (and if you don't believe me, Ron Sider does a great job of proving this) that he cared about the poor and that God does, too.

Steve Lopez paints another grim picture of the realities of poverty in his series for the LA Times called Skid Row. I think you should check it out.