Well there is something I know about myself that perhaps you don’t know. If something crazy is going to happen and I am around it’s probably going to happen to me. These occurrences are sometimes good and sometimes bad. Like for instance yesterday in my schools library I went online to check my facebook but low and behold I typed in facevook which it turns out is a very intense porn sight (if you say it with a Swedish accent I guess it makes since). The girl sitting next to me gave me a dirty look as I tried to explain I was just trying to get to my facebook. She did not believe me. So there I am in my seminaries library looking at hardcore porn. So it goes.
So yesterday after visiting Portland’s Japanese Gardens my roommate Jonathan stopped into the William Sonoma Home store to feel bad about our own personal furniture. Lets just say usually I am concerned that people think we are a gay couple but this day I wasn’t worried because we were dressed terrible and just looked like dirty/poor straight men and as it turns out I guess we are. I ran down the street to use the restroom so Jonathan went in by himself only to be followed around the store by the clerk because she was afraid he was going to steal something. My first thought when I heard what happened was to defend my wealth status. I wanted her to know that I was not poor and who did she think she was to just assume that I was of the lower class. Then it hit me. I am poor! Sort of.
I don’t have a job and I certainly don’t have any money. But to be honest I have my parent’s bankcard in my wallet and for the time that pays for everything I need. Don’t get me wrong my parents aren’t rich but because of them I am an upper middle class American citizen. Portland like every major and minor city in the US has a lot of homeless people. I don’t know how to respond anymore. Every time I go out I am asked multiple times for money and I have to remind myself that I can’t afford to help as I walk to starbucks to buy my $4 pumpkin spice latte. There’s just something not all right about the whole thing. A question a good friend of mine asked, “What have we become”. Don’t get me wrong I get sick of this conversation just as much as the next guy but it’s the tension I live in and I don’t have the option of closing my eyes.
THE PROBLEM: Its here and I am here and the KINGDOM is at hand and I don’t know what to do. Or do I? Do you?
And Jesus told us to call them. In Luke 14 he said,
Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in here the poor and crippled and blind and lame . . . When you give a reception, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, since they do not have the means to repay you; for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.
