He Describes God's Preferential Option for the Poor This Way

I've been reading The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey this past week, and yesterday I read the chapter where he discusses Matthew 5, aka The Beatitudes. I was encouraged to realize that our current situation, what with the irregular and unreliable income, the expenses, the stress, really is a blessing. It may seem trite when you compare our circumstances with those of others who have not been as well-provided for as we have, but I haven't gotten over thinking of us as poor.

Yancey quotes Monika Hellwig, who "lists the following 'advantages' to being poor:

1. The poor know they are in urgent need of redemption.
2. The poor know not only their dependence on God and on powerful people but also their interdependence with one another.
3. The poor rest their security not on things but on people.
4. The poor have no exaggerated need of privacy.
5. The poor expect little from competition and much from cooperation.
6. The poor can distinguish between necessities and luxuries.
7. The poor can wait, because they have acquired a kind of dogged patience born of acknowledged dependence.
8. The fears of the poor are more realistic and less exaggerated, because they already know that one can survive great suffering and want.
9. When the poor have the Gospel preached to them, it sounds like good news and not like a threat or a scolding.
10. The poor can respond to the call of the Gospel with a certain abandonment and uncomplicated totality because they have so little to lose and are ready for anything."

Can you be poor and not share any of these traits. Of course you can, and maybe particularly while living in as affluent a nation as ours. But if you can be poor and realize these advantages, realize as in making them your own, you are truly blessed. The one I really responded to was #8. What would it be like to have only the most realistic of fears? Of course Hellwig's points are problematic and easy to romanticize, but that makes them no less true.

So as I got up out of my chair yesterday morning to get a cup of coffee, I asked God to keep me aware of the blessing that accompanies poverty in all of its forms, to help me not to forget my dependence on Him. I also began to realize that what I consider a lack of personal success really isn't so bad a thing.

An hour later I have already forgotten what I've read, and I am in tears because of the insecurity accompanied by loneliness that I revealed in yesterday's blog post. It takes almost no time at all for me to forget that I am blessed. But then the reminder comes, which is why I am composing this post.