Love and Poverty
(About a 5min read, but it’s a good investment of your time!)
For many years I said I knew Jesus… but dabbled in the demonic… I never understood what separated me from God… I thought it was the Church… I felt rejected and constantly kept outside of “The Circle”… as I called it.
I developed my view, of the Church as and Elitist group that held spiritual rule (or manipulation) over gullible people, over two decades… progressively jaded and bitter…
Eventually, I became bitter and began to hate Christians… I quickly realized that there was a rather large group of people who agreed with me… we would gather and complain… it was like the unpopular kids in high school griping about not fitting in… but also, not wanting to be better…
The strange part of this thinking is that I despised myself… and yet I expected other people to like me… I was the epitome of entitlement… I had big dreams and little follow-through… and I expected everyone to just be ok with that because I had a hard life…
One day after work, I sat down with a friend and expressed my feelings and disgust… I was fully expecting another bashing session on the Christian Church… but they didn’t engage… instead they proposed a question that I’ll never forget… they said “Why are you waiting for someone to hold your hand and do life for you?… Go and accomplish your own dreams and successes…” I sat there in an offended stupor and left without much to say…
For two years that moment rang in my head… it swirled and haunted me… and then one night I had a dream…
In this dream I was walking down the center line of a busy road… there were distractions left and right… cars would whip by me some fast and some slow… and I would grumble and mutter curses over their successes… slowly my vision turned to a burning red hue and I sat down in the middle of the street… eventually my eyes cleared and opened… and I was wearing rags… I smelled like I hadn’t had a shower in weeks… I looked down and saw that I was holding a sign that said “homeless, anything helps… God bless…”
Moments like these are small awakenings to reality… and God has a way of reaching us even in rebellion… John 3:26 states “for God so loved the world…” I was the world… and He loved me enough to encounter me and help me inspire of my hard and selfish heart… he gave me a vision of the poverty on my heart… I awakened… I didn’t know it was God… but it lead me one step closer to Him…
The first step to receiving Gods best is to recognize what’s in your heart… because, out of it your mouth speaks and your issues of life flow…
My life changed that day… my journey shifted into an awareness of the poverty that I embraced… and it set me free… in part…
Thanks for listening,
🤍
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