welcome to summer

hey all,

a co-worker friend of mine passed me a book the other day in order to prepare for an upcoming youth event. i am to prepare a short presentation on world poverty and i wanted to share with you folks a quote that resonated with me. i think i'll be doing this every now and then thru out this blog....it's a good outlet to share what im learning:

"Poverty, resistance, the ingenuity of survivors, the self-sacrifice of women, the search for a better life - these things are not new in the world. With urbanization and 'modernization' people meet new forms of poverty - the drug dealer and the gun, addictions and violence, in the favela and the barrio as well as the public-housing schemes of North America and Europe. These give a new urgency to the search for a common, global solidarity between poor people in their search, not for riches but for security and sufficiency. The simple aims have everywhere been smothered by the economic imperative of constant growth and the compulsion of 'more', rather than what constitutes enough for daily needs" (emphasis added, Seabrook, 7-8).

When i was younger, i used to recite the Lord's prayer every night. one particular part of it has always stood out to me, and i think it's because with each year of my life, i understand it better. in light of this book, i think i understand it in a deeper way.

"give us this day our daily bread"

i think i now have a better understanding of the weight of the term "sufficiency". and it aligns so well with my understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. our culture that demands excess, extra, larger, bigger, super-size, enhanced, upgrade is not satisfied with what was once sufficient. what happened? i later read this:

"The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It s not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash" (John Berger, as quoted in No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty).

now, i don't want to make it seem like i'm blaming rich people for world poverty, but really i don't believe that poverty is an economic issue. instead, it is a social issue that will only be resolved when we begin to see poor, bums, homeless, street people as equal instead of inferior, lazy, and drunk.

the opposite of poverty isn't riches...it's sufficiency.

dL