The Poor Will Always Be With You.

[Neighbor]

- Now when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came up to him with an alabaster flask of very expensive ointment, and she poured it on his head as he reclined at table.  And when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, “Why this waste?  For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.”  But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me.  For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.  In pouring this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare me for burial.  Truly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.” -

 

The poor evidently will always be with us, and some of us will be the poor too! Around the world the poor and the oppressed are on the move from extreme oppression to desperate journeying towards any hope, any at all.

But where does the trail go or end? Is there hope to be found? What happens to the poor in the lands of milk and honey? Is it different today than it was say when the Grapes Of Wrath was a reality in the USA? With all the government programs is there a difference today from then?

The poor, the displaced, the cold, at Asheville North Carolina USA have been bulldozed out of their encampments three times in the recent past according to news items. Their portable propane heaters, little plastic tents, carts with clothing, all plowed up and taken away  on a city dump truck - Little or no warning given- just plowed over.  That strikes me as being no progress at all from the time of the story of the great depression era and the novel the Grapes of Wrath.

 Is that the best that any of us can come up with, plow the poor out of the way? To where, where is there no place bothersome for the poor to go, the place where they are not seen as blight on the communities? 

 

[Neighbor]

I am hoping this will be or become more than just a lament, a musing over the plight of some, many, tens of thousands; even multiple millions upon millions of people.

Might it become a prayer? A prayer  leading to a call for action,  and/or prayer  that  the poor will not be frowned upon, disdained or even just pitied, but instead there will be prayer to God in the name of Yeshua, even with the deep groaning of the Holy Spirit, for lack of the human vocabulary to express the needs of the desperate poor.

May the poor be respected as one might desire respect be received for ones self.

May the Holy Spirit convict that plowing over the poor's merger possessions  does not lift up communities, it impoverishes them away from any compassion and from loving God and one another.

May prayer lead to action, Amen