There's no getting off the hook

Wednesday night we had snow, almost a foot of it here on the high plains. When I got home from work, the house was dark. No power. The landlord has been very ill, in and out of the hospital since October. She forgot to pay the electric company. They shut off the power.

After a cold night, and a morning of snow shoveling and book reading by a bright window, I decided to go to the library, since the house was freezing cold. Still dressed in the clothes I wore Wednesday, unshaven and unbathed, I was right at home at the computer in the library, next to other unshaven, unbathed people using the library's free computers.

Sure enough, as soon as I sat down, one woman approached me and asked for cash or a "gift card." I knew this woman. I knew from listening to her ex-boyfriend that she had just gotten out of jail for a driving violation. I asked her if she had been to Social Services. She told me she had an appointment next Tuesday. I asked her if she had used the food bank. She said she had used it ten times, and that is the yearly maximum allowed. She was in the library applying for jobs on-line.

I started surfing the net. The first place I go every day is A Holy Experience, Ann Voskamp's blog. Ann had just returned from a mission trip to Haiti. As I read her February 21 post, I immediately became convicted. Ann wrote,

Once we have seen the poor, we are responsible — we will make a response. As long as your heart is beating, there’s no such thing as unresponsive. We all look into the face of the poor and it’s either Yes, I will help. Or no, I won’t.

There’s no getting off the hook.

Faith cannot have a non-response.

We’re either responding with indifference or with intercession, either with apathy or aid.

You can’t look into the face of the poor and just plead the fifth amendment. Your life is always your answer.

Why would we rather turn a blind eye to the needy than turn to the needy and be like Christ? Do we like our own wants and comfort more than we want to be like Christ?

Ann's son commented as they were leaving Haiti on the way back to their farm in Canada,

“Sure am glad I wasn’t born in a place like this – glad I was born in the land of the strong and free.”

And I hissed shhhhhh.

But for days that’s what kept echoing – no, shouting — in my head: “It’s by and large where you are born.” What would your life look like if you were born onto the heaving streets of Port Au Prince instead of all that clean air somewhere west of Central Park?

If you were born onto dirt and mud in the tarped cities of Haiti instead of the windows and water and wealth of the Western world?

You can turn a blind eye to the poor all you want but it could have turned out that you were the poor.

You don’t forget who your brother is — when you know Who your Father is.

If the grace of my life is mostly where I am born, and I am born again into the family of Christ, than how can my life birth anything other than a grace that gives?

And hath made of one blood all nations of men …

Acts 17:26

Before I finished reading Ann's post I saw that it was time to go to work. I placed some folded bills on the woman's computer, and walked out to my car.