Jesus was in the student center...

The hallways of my conservative Christian college - which is currently constructing a $20,000,000 new chapel building - are currently stained with the smell of cigarettes and poverty.

Let me explain, A Meijer store is opening almost across the street from the college that I attend. The county in which we are located has one of the worst unemployment rates in the state and the depravity and poverty are evident. The new store will be offering hundreds of jobs to both students and residents of this county. Our school agreed to be the location for the mass interviews that are happening for this store. Over the next few days the store will interview more than 1000 people for these positions. The people who are filling the hallways are surprising in many ways. They are first noticeably different than 95% of the student body here. The tuition at the school is nearing $30,000 per year and most of the people in this snaking line of people are not only unemployed but even while employed, were not making that much in a year.

Most of us here at this school have never lived in any sort of poverty or even what it is like to be a part of even the “lower class” in America. (I will abstain from discussions of what Poverty is for now, and believe me I know that $30,000 is not that terrible a salary, unless it is accompanied by the more than $100,000 debt that many students and families accrue at this school.) The second reason that these people seem out of place is their age. Many of the people standing in this nearly endless line are well over the age of retirement or at the very least above a minimum wage job such as this.

The tragedy of this is that people who were promised pensions for their many years of hard service are not receiving them either because of the fund no longer existing or that they were laid off. The others in the group are Mothers and Fathers and Aunts and Uncles who lost careers because of the squalor that is our current economy. They are now forced to take a job that high school and college students are the usual recipients of. The last demographic that could be seen in this group were those who have been driven all the way to homelessness, and were looking for a way out of a system that had (and still has) everything moving against them.

Now the really sad part of this is that these people were being stared at by so many of the students that passed them on the way to Chapel or to lunch. (As an aside, I think it’s beautiful that, though it has become so easy to remove ourselves from the “unsavory” parts of town and to see the poor and homeless as something far away, God brought them to our doorstep this week.) There was this general feeling throughout the hallway that “these people do not belong.” But the beautiful thing is that God had some teaching in store with this. This week is “Missions Week” in chapel and there are missions reps in our student center for all sorts of Global and domestic missions.

It is perfect that in these days it can be seen by all at the school that we do not have to travel thousands of miles to reach a need. There is a mission field right here only miles from where we live, and for a few days in our midst. But then we are confronted with the dilemma of what to do about this.

How do we proclaim a good God in a world that has good reason to believe otherwise?

Well the first thing that we need to do is to form relationships. When we look at these issues as issues then they are distant and abstract. But when we think of poverty and are reminded of friends of ours who are stuck in poverty, then suddenly poverty is not an idea, but it is a person. It’s so much easier and useful to help a person than to attack a “problem” or issue. I don’t know where you come from or what your background is, but we could all use some people in our lives who are not like us.

I guess in the end that’s all I’m trying to say. If we can expand "our people" to include those unlike us, I don’t think we’ll have to be told to move into action. I believe that we will do all that we can to help our friends. And maybe next time there is a line of people waiting for their chance, we won’t stare, but we’ll do something about it. Because our friends are in that line... because Jesus is in that line. Grace and Peace.