ugh, rat cage.

“Perhaps a lunatic is simply a minority of one.” – 1984, George Orwell

i have so many thoughts swimming through my head. i just finished reading “the irresistible revolution.”

it’s nice to know i’m not as crazy as it sometimes feels i am. that’s hard to break down. example: i voted third party in the last election. some people’s comments made it seem like i was naïve or didn’t put enough thought into my vote. i’m not crazy.

i am taking two major thoughts away from this book.

1) the vision and drive to help eradicate poverty in other countries, and even in our own, is coming largely from unbelievers. this should not be. but if we don’t cry out, the rocks will, right? and they have been…

2) “Almost every time we talk with affluent folks about God’s will to end poverty, someone says, “But didn’t Jesus say, ‘The poor will always be with you’?” Many of the people who whip out this verse have grown quite insulated and distant from the poor and feel defensive. I usually gently ask, “Where are the poor? Are the poor among us?” The answer is usually a clear negatory…Far from saying in defeat that we should not worry about the poor, since they will always be among us, Jesus is pointing the church to her true identity – she is to live close to those who suffer.”

that’s a big one for me. i hear that objection a lot. and it has always been unsettling. anytime you get worked up about poverty, someone says that! as if that’s an excuse for not weeping for those who suffer. not just donating money or serving dinner to homeless people on thanksgiving, but actually grieving the fact that people live in poverty. are the poor with me? not just out in the world somewhere, but sitting on my front porch or in the pew next to me at church.

it is hard to have passions and dreams that other people explain away, or don’t feel themselves.. it is discouraging to feel hope for change, but not know how to bring it about. this book has definitely helped me process a lot that has been stirring inside me for the past few years. which is too long. when i graduated, i had a super hard time trying to find a job. even though i have one of those magical college degrees. so i began to imagine how hard it must be for people who don't have one...which opened the door to a lot more questions.

and now i can never go back to ignoring poverty, or how it happens. or blaming the people in poverty for not working hard enough.

i don’t feel like saying anything else. i don’t really know what to say. or do. but i’m so glad i go to a church that has the same crazy dreams, and can help me figure it all out.

just read these quotes. believe it or not, i narrowed it down.

Meanwhile, many of us find ourselves estranged from the narrow issues that define conservatives and from the shallow spirituality that marks liberals. We are thirsty for social justice and peace but have a hard time finding a faith community that is consistently pro-life or that recognizes that there are “moral issues” other than homosexuality and abortion, moral issues like war and poverty.

We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.

If you ask most people what Christians believe, they can tell you, “Christians believe that Jesus is God’s Son and that Jesus rose from the dead.” But if you ask the average person how Christians live, they are struck silent. We have not shown the world another way of doing life.

Sometimes we speak to change the world; other times we speak to keep the world from changing us. We are about ending poverty, not simply managing it. We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.

We try to make the world safe, knowing that the world will never be safe as long as millions live in poverty so the few can live as they wish.

It is a beautiful thing when folks in poverty are no longer just a missions project but become genuine friends and family with whom we laugh, cry, dream, and struggle.

Once we are actually friends with folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity.

When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. She ceases to be something we are, the living bride of Christ. The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get clothed and fed), but no one leaves transformed. No radical new community is formed.

As we consider what it means to be “born again,” as the evangelical jargon goes, we must ask what it means to be born again into a family in which our sisters and brothers are starving to death….It also becomes scandalous for the church to spend money on windows and buildings when some family members don’t even have water.

I’m convinced that God did not mess up and make too many people and not enough stuff. Poverty was created not by God but by you and me, because we have not learned to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Look into the eyes of the ones who are hardest for you to like, and see the One you love.

While most activists could use a good dose of gentleness (after all, it is a fruit of the Spirit), I think most believers could use a good dose of holy anger.

…what is crazier: one person owning the same amount of money as the combined economies of twenty-three countries, or suggesting that if we shared, there would be enough for everyone?

Someday war and poverty will be crazy, and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist. Some of us have just caught a glimpse of the beauty of the promised land, and it is so dazzling that our eyes are forever fixed on it, never to look back at the way of that old empire again.