Poor

Almost every morning when I pull out of the garage of the Grinnell Building, in my comfy car with heated seats,---the engineer that invented heated seats should win a peace prize….or at least a we-love-warm-seats prize!—onto the streets of Detroit, my brain says ‘the poor you will always have among you…’

I’m probably taking the verse out of context….but my brain flips there to try to make sense of the scene around me. To say to myself, ‘Look, Jesus said there are always going to be poor among you, so get used to it already would you.’ To somehow avoid the otherwise extremely uncomfortable reality that somehow I’ve been spared the kind of poverty that my neighbors experience daily (not that I don’t have my own kind of poverty...)

Then I started thinking, but just because Jesus said there will always be poor, he probably didn’t mean that was okay…I mean, the other half of his sentence says something like, ‘and you can always do something for them…’

[This ramble was spurred on by the musings of a talk radio guy…I don’t even know who he is actually, but his fear of justice got my Irish up this morning.]