What do I know of poverty?  When I ask hard questions and have unreasonably high expectations from churches, where does this come from?  What do I know of being poor?

I know when I was little I grew up in the city.  My cousins and best friend lived a block over.  Our other best friends lived 2 houses down, and even shared my last name.  They were black, we were white, and we jokingly told people we were related.

Our family car for awhile was a red Pinto with a white stripe around it.  It had no heat, so my brother and I cuddled in the backseat with a big, comfy quilt as we drove my dad to work each morning.  The dashboard was cracked because one time my dad got mad and pounded his fist on it.  Sometimes it wouldn’t start.  My dad and the neighbors would push it down the road, coast it down the block, to a big hill where it would pick up enough speed that he could drive it.

One time I had my red sled stolen off our porch.

One time a bullet went through my bedroom window.

One time my dad waved his shotgun out the window to stop someone from breaking into our woody wagon.  One time my brother won a bike race with some other boys and one of them punched him.

We became part of a movement known as white flight.  A few years ago, the racial and wealth disparity of that city and it’s neighboring city became the subject of a fairly well-known book.

I drove by our old neighborhood not too long ago.  It looks mostly the same.  Maybe a little dingier.  But that’s probably memory speaking.  I think it was always shabby, and I just didn’t know.

I didn’t know pushing a pinto to start it was unusual.  I thought it was great fun.  I didn’t know most people didn’t huddle under their living room window to peek at the drug bust going on across the street.  I thought it was an adventure to have police officers use our house to hide and watch.

We had bedrooms, food, clothes, friends, the freedom to roam the neighborhood, and we knew our neighbors, black and white.

I didn’t know anything about being poor.

After my brother got beat up, my grandpa gave us the money for a security deposit and we moved to a small town nearby.  It was rich.  Ritzy rich.  We rented an apartment from a friend of a friend.  2 bedroom, 700 sq ft, 5 people.  For 5 years.

Now I knew I was poor.  But, I was also learning there were levels of poverty.  Thanks to this wealthy area, I learned what trailer trash was, where the hicks lived, and where the ‘they’ve got money’ neighborhoods were.

I got a better education than most kids in the towns around us did.  We made a lot of friends, settled in, and tried to blend in.

It was a mostly white school, but we had a lot of foreign exchange students.  Our youth group would try to get to know them, and we made good friends with a couple of them.  I suspect our motivations came more out of the fact that we were trying to be missionaries instead of friends, but I think we became both.

I look back now and think how accepting the general population was to those exotic students, come from foreign lands, (well, except for the soccer player from Bulgaria; the guys loved his skills, the girls loved his looks, but no one loved that he didn’t shower or wear deodorant.), but the 2 Hispanic migrant kids who were there for half the year, every year, who I think had trouble with English, we pretty much ignored.  I think about how, for a long time there was only one black boy, and the rich white boys called him names.  And I stood there, ashamed.  Aware of my poorness, my insecurity, my just-trying-to-fit-in-ness, I said nothing.

Our churches were white and fairly rich, and we went there to fix ourselves.  To be better people.  To remind us that Jesus died for us, so we needed to live out of that gratefulness and not sin.

And now, as an adult, I’m not that different in action.  But there was that time I prayed for something to get involved with, and my friend told me she was starting an inner-city teen Mops and would I want to help.

Those 2 years of Saturday mornings were so hard, and yet so filling.  I know now how hard it is to start a program, get money and volunteers and churches to support it.  I’ve seen the fall out of it, and how ‘helping others too much’ was one reason that led to the church closing.

I know how my eyes were opened, my beliefs were challenged, and I saw politics in a new light after knowing those girls.

I know that reading can never be the same as knowing.

But that’s mostly what I do now.  I don’t have any outlets to get to know people different than me.  And yet I live in a town that has a 6% Hispanic population, which, for this area of the country, is a lot.  And 5.7% of my town lives below the poverty line.

There are others all around me, and I just don’t know how to connect.  How to know them.

And so when I critique my church experiences, ask why they don’t do certain things, why they reduce helping the poor to writing a check, it is because I have spent 19 of my 31 years being insulated from people different from me.  I have been raised by churches that have seemed oblivious to everyone around us, because we have turned our Christianity into an individualistic experience and only view people as projects, when we view them at all.

I don’t know much about poverty and helping.  I feel like a poser much of the time, reading books and asking questions, but at the end of the day, I don’t know where to begin, and my personality makes it very hard to jump cold feet into something unknown.

I feel like it’s the church’s job to embrace the globe, embrace everyone around us and give the body the tools to know and love the people all around us.  In my experience, the churches have done an abysmal job at that, and I want to figure out a way to help that change.

As an adult, looking back on my life, I can see how hard it was for my parents.  But we were always welcomed by the church, because we were one of them.  We were white, in the right schools, Christians.  If we can embrace the people among us, who might have different circumstances and challenges, why can’t we embrace those outside of us?

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