do i know the poor?

(photo via Mark Driscoll, www.twitter.com/pastormark)

tonight, a little girl will sleep on the streets of india as an outcast.

tonight, a little boy will fall asleep an orphan in haiti.

tonight, a child in uganda will die of hunger.

"I asked participants who claimed to be "strong followers of Jesus" whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question, I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did. I learned a powerful lesson:

We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did.

We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things.

We can adore his cross without taking up ours.

I had come to see that the great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor." -shane claiborne

i can't honestly think of one single person in poverty in my life.