I’ve been taking some courses from the Christian counseling center, and yesterday morning (Thursday) I had to go by their headquarters near downtown Beaumont to pick up some materials. As I left, I changed my mind about how I was going to come back. Instead of going through downtown, I decided to come back on MLK. As a result, I ended up turning down a side road that ran between Magnolia and MLK. When I came around the corner, I found the street was full of prostitutes. They were right out in the street, going up to peoples cars.
I’d seen things like this in Houston when I lived there in the 80’s, but I never saw anything like this here. It’s one thing to know it goes on somewhere out of sight, but it was a shock to turn the corner and come face to face with it. And face to face I was—for a moment, at least. One of them was coming toward my car! Although she couldn’t have been more than thirty or so, the pain and horror of her life was graven so deeply into the lines of her face, I couldn’t bear to look at her for more than a moment. I had to stare at my steering wheel. (Not to mention I didn’t want her coming up to my car!)
We all step out of the light sometimes and stumble around in the darkness for a while before being drawn back to the path. But there are people who’ve been stumbling in darkness so long and who’ve wandered so far from the path they don’t know what light is anymore.
Jesus said, “The poor will be with you always.” But the poor are not really with us any more. They’re all on the other side of town, and we don’t go over there; we never see them; we’re not exposed to the lives they live. I can’t help thinking that if we lived among them as Jesus did, if we spent all our days surrounded by the kind of people I saw in the street yesterday, we could not help but feel differently about the lives we live.
So my prayer request is this: Offer a prayer today for those who are truly poor—not just poor in material goods, but poor in spirit—those whose souls are destitute, who have forgotten how to hope. These are those that Jesus had the heart for—those whom He called “blessed.”
