I am poor.
And not the cool, tragically semi-Goth poor of Dickinson novels. I am just… no-money,-little-shame,-wish-I-really-weren’t-but-really-am-poor poor.
The irony that I am writing a blog about being poor isn’t lost on me, as the ‘Net costs to access, but I’m poor – not incapable. I use the tools I have in the way I can to convey what I know, and hopefully learn more along the way. I’m just like everyone else that way.
It’s just a little harder sometimes.
There’s a scripture that says it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to go heaven, and I used to think, well, yay for me. I’ll get there before the camels and the rich people.
But I think it might be harder for a poor person in a rich country to trust God than it is for rich person in a poor country to make it to heaven.
Speaking as a poor person, I can truthfully say, trusting God jacks with my head.
First off, no sane person has seen God. We can romanticize this idea and say God is like the wind and we can’t see that either – but I live in the South. You can see wind. Watch a tornado. It’s nothing but wind and water and rage.
It’s mind-messin’ to admit that I believe in a God I can’t see, even if He did create the universe and holds planets in His palms.
Second, His followers (as much as I love some of them) drive me crazy. Two words: Jehovah’s Witnesses. Yeah, I can already see the factions forming, and before you go grab weapons or start arguing; they are classified under the Christian umbrella and they claim Christ. If you want to call them a cult, I’d remind you that’s how Christianity started out.
To that other group who understood, I get that we’re working on it, and it’s a process. I get that we’re all flawed, and all the other things that we tell ourselves, but it’s our fault we’re in this mess. We should have known better.
Third, there’s no benefit in being a Christian as a poor person. Watch the news. It’s always the crazy poor people who love Jesus who lose their trailers or end up on Cops. The ones that sing to Him seem to always have the best drugs. Although they’re inclined to keep their skittle colored pills to themselves, their sticky Jesus is freely slopped about anywhere and everywhere they go.
So here I am, a poor, cynical, post-modernist freak living in the South, wondering where to go from here.
How did I get here? What is here, really?
I was raised poor. My dad was crazy, so bills didn’t get paid and we snuck out on rent late at night – a lot. The good days meant I could go to the hospital for surgery to fix the infection that ate through my eardrum; the bad ones meant hiding in a cabinet, hoping my stomach didn’t rumble, so my dad wouldn’t find me.
My mom left my dad, with no work experience in 13 years. We left – kids, mom, puppy, and a Datsun 210, fully expecting to be homeless for a while. We lived in a hotel for a couple of nights, found a house. It got better. We were safe; that was priceless… but we were poor.
My brother constantly needed attention and help, and there were always meetings to discuss his “future.” There were doctors and meds and tests that needed to be run. There were no answers, but there was always another test he’d be signed up for, just to be sure.
We seemed to be working it all out, even saw the chance to maybe find a level place to just be mundane for a while.
And it’s not that anything it happened. It’s that nothing did.
We had a tight month, and we got caught with more month than money. It’s not unusual, and it’s kind of surprising it hasn’t happened before.
But it doesn’t feel usual. It hurts.
And it makes me angry at God and feel powerless. I want to yell and just hurt something in return.
I want to drive fast, with music blaring, showing how much I don’t care… but gas costs money I don’t have and would have to be replaced. And no one quite understands the cost of things like someone who can’t have them.
I want to get mad and it make a difference. I don’t want to have to call my friends and say I can’t afford a cheap ticket to a Rangers game (directly behind home plate!) because I didn’t have electricity just a few hours before.
I want to be able to make a plan and follow through with it; like God actually noticed that I was trying to do good and be good and fit my life to His plan and it all actually mattered!
I want to feel like my life is my own… and not just some thread in some galaxy-sized crocheted blanket covered in God’s fingerprints.
I want to stop wondering if I shouldn’t be doing something different. And I hate feeling like if I’d just been smarter/faster/better that God’d’ve given me the money and taken care of me.
And yeah… it’d be great if I could figure out what the lesson here is, and if I could have learned it a different way.
So, setting aside the anger and the hurt and the You-suck,-God!s for a moment…. What do I have? What story line could explain this turn of events? What am I left with?
A chip.
I have a chip on my shoulders because I expect to be hurt and have everything that matters to me taken away. Can’t let myself actually trust because when I get hurt (and I will!), it won’t be worth all the effort I put into trusting in the first place.
God can’t be as good as He says, or as cool as others claim. That’s just not possible. Better, safer to pay lip service and move on.
A chip. A plank in my eye.
And if it’s not good for me, and it’s not of God (which is 6 of one, ½ dozen of another), it needs to not be there.
So the chip on my shoulder can be another chip in my ego-plating. Iyanla Vanzant made the comment recently that she counts it a blessing that she lost millions, a daughter, a marriage, and her dream house.
She said that losing the things that mattered too much to her has allowed her to give herself away so that she can be of use by God.
I didn’t get that expression before. Being a good little girl, “giving yourself away” was bad, leading to inappropriately touched “flowers,” girls in trouble, and of course, faster weddings with shotguns.
Even U2 couldn’t explain it to me, even though I kept listening to them, hoping.
But there is something haunting and heart-strengthening about the idea of someone releasing everything safe to follow something so much greater and so much bigger.
Hope may be the thing with feathers; and I may have always thought it with razor-bladed feet; but existence without it is not something I can afford.
So, this chick with a chip follows a camel through this eye of a needle…
Not quite as cool as a nun walking into a bar with a turtle under her arm, but I bet it gave God a chuckle.
And not the cool, tragically semi-Goth poor of Dickinson novels. I am just… no-money,-little-shame,-wish-I-really-weren’t-but-really-am-poor poor.
The irony that I am writing a blog about being poor isn’t lost on me, as the ‘Net costs to access, but I’m poor – not incapable. I use the tools I have in the way I can to convey what I know, and hopefully learn more along the way. I’m just like everyone else that way.
It’s just a little harder sometimes.
There’s a scripture that says it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to go heaven, and I used to think, well, yay for me. I’ll get there before the camels and the rich people.
But I think it might be harder for a poor person in a rich country to trust God than it is for rich person in a poor country to make it to heaven.
Speaking as a poor person, I can truthfully say, trusting God jacks with my head.
First off, no sane person has seen God. We can romanticize this idea and say God is like the wind and we can’t see that either – but I live in the South. You can see wind. Watch a tornado. It’s nothing but wind and water and rage.
It’s mind-messin’ to admit that I believe in a God I can’t see, even if He did create the universe and holds planets in His palms.
Second, His followers (as much as I love some of them) drive me crazy. Two words: Jehovah’s Witnesses. Yeah, I can already see the factions forming, and before you go grab weapons or start arguing; they are classified under the Christian umbrella and they claim Christ. If you want to call them a cult, I’d remind you that’s how Christianity started out.
To that other group who understood, I get that we’re working on it, and it’s a process. I get that we’re all flawed, and all the other things that we tell ourselves, but it’s our fault we’re in this mess. We should have known better.
Third, there’s no benefit in being a Christian as a poor person. Watch the news. It’s always the crazy poor people who love Jesus who lose their trailers or end up on Cops. The ones that sing to Him seem to always have the best drugs. Although they’re inclined to keep their skittle colored pills to themselves, their sticky Jesus is freely slopped about anywhere and everywhere they go.
So here I am, a poor, cynical, post-modernist freak living in the South, wondering where to go from here.
How did I get here? What is here, really?
I was raised poor. My dad was crazy, so bills didn’t get paid and we snuck out on rent late at night – a lot. The good days meant I could go to the hospital for surgery to fix the infection that ate through my eardrum; the bad ones meant hiding in a cabinet, hoping my stomach didn’t rumble, so my dad wouldn’t find me.
My mom left my dad, with no work experience in 13 years. We left – kids, mom, puppy, and a Datsun 210, fully expecting to be homeless for a while. We lived in a hotel for a couple of nights, found a house. It got better. We were safe; that was priceless… but we were poor.
My brother constantly needed attention and help, and there were always meetings to discuss his “future.” There were doctors and meds and tests that needed to be run. There were no answers, but there was always another test he’d be signed up for, just to be sure.
We seemed to be working it all out, even saw the chance to maybe find a level place to just be mundane for a while.
And it’s not that anything it happened. It’s that nothing did.
We had a tight month, and we got caught with more month than money. It’s not unusual, and it’s kind of surprising it hasn’t happened before.
But it doesn’t feel usual. It hurts.
And it makes me angry at God and feel powerless. I want to yell and just hurt something in return.
I want to drive fast, with music blaring, showing how much I don’t care… but gas costs money I don’t have and would have to be replaced. And no one quite understands the cost of things like someone who can’t have them.
I want to get mad and it make a difference. I don’t want to have to call my friends and say I can’t afford a cheap ticket to a Rangers game (directly behind home plate!) because I didn’t have electricity just a few hours before.
I want to be able to make a plan and follow through with it; like God actually noticed that I was trying to do good and be good and fit my life to His plan and it all actually mattered!
I want to feel like my life is my own… and not just some thread in some galaxy-sized crocheted blanket covered in God’s fingerprints.
I want to stop wondering if I shouldn’t be doing something different. And I hate feeling like if I’d just been smarter/faster/better that God’d’ve given me the money and taken care of me.
And yeah… it’d be great if I could figure out what the lesson here is, and if I could have learned it a different way.
So, setting aside the anger and the hurt and the You-suck,-God!s for a moment…. What do I have? What story line could explain this turn of events? What am I left with?
A chip.
I have a chip on my shoulders because I expect to be hurt and have everything that matters to me taken away. Can’t let myself actually trust because when I get hurt (and I will!), it won’t be worth all the effort I put into trusting in the first place.
God can’t be as good as He says, or as cool as others claim. That’s just not possible. Better, safer to pay lip service and move on.
A chip. A plank in my eye.
And if it’s not good for me, and it’s not of God (which is 6 of one, ½ dozen of another), it needs to not be there.
So the chip on my shoulder can be another chip in my ego-plating. Iyanla Vanzant made the comment recently that she counts it a blessing that she lost millions, a daughter, a marriage, and her dream house.
She said that losing the things that mattered too much to her has allowed her to give herself away so that she can be of use by God.
I didn’t get that expression before. Being a good little girl, “giving yourself away” was bad, leading to inappropriately touched “flowers,” girls in trouble, and of course, faster weddings with shotguns.
Even U2 couldn’t explain it to me, even though I kept listening to them, hoping.
But there is something haunting and heart-strengthening about the idea of someone releasing everything safe to follow something so much greater and so much bigger.
Hope may be the thing with feathers; and I may have always thought it with razor-bladed feet; but existence without it is not something I can afford.
So, this chick with a chip follows a camel through this eye of a needle…
Not quite as cool as a nun walking into a bar with a turtle under her arm, but I bet it gave God a chuckle.
