Blessed Are The Poor

I have for months had a question tucked away in my back pocket, waiting for the right opportunity to pull it out. Asking it bore an element of risk, I thought, because it might convey a lack of understanding or sensitivity. After all, isn't the answer obvious?

While in Nampula, I took the opportunity to pull the question out and lay it on someone who makes less in a month than I have ever made in a day since graduating from university: do you consider yourself to be poor?

"No, I am not poor. Of course, I am not rich either. To be rich would be to not have to worry about where my next meal was going to come from."

Never having had to worry about where my next meal was going to come from, I realized that poverty is definitely relative. Who in Canada, having made less than $1,000 in the previous year as the head of a household, would not consider him or herself to be poor? As he continued speaking, I became more and more intrigued by his reflections.

"I was rich once, you know."

He went on to describe for me that he used to live as the personal assistant for a wealthy foreigner here in Maputo. He earned a salary of slightly under $150 per month, but was also given accommodation and access to his patron's refrigerator. He had a life free of worry. A life of wealth.

"And being rich," he had come to realize, "is boring."

"I remember once when I didn't cook for an entire week," he explained to me. "I just ate these soups that my patron had in the cupboard, the kind where I just had to pour in boiling water, and had ham sandwiches grilled in a sandwich maker."

(I thought quietly to myself at that moment about all the times that Laura and I have picked up the telephone and ordered in food because we were just too tired, or couldn't be bothered, to cook something as simple as a grilled sandwich -- because that would be too much work.)

"But I was often lonely, just looking after his house while he was away on business."

For this one Mozambican, life's objective is not riches. It is being in positive, meaningful relationship with neighbours. It is being able to live up to his God-given potential which, he learned, is not sitting around babysitting a house that sheltered him from worry. A little bit of worry, he seemed to be suggesting, is the adventure that adds spice to life. The spice that keeps us relying on God rather than ourselves.

And in that moment I was more sure of this one fact than I have ever been in my life: that the objective of my international compassion ministry should be to equip people so that they are able to live up to their God-given potential, not simply to provide food for the hungry.

The poor are not those who cannot afford a Jaguar, or even a jalopy. The poor are those, with or without their jalopy, who are barred from realizing the potential that God has created within them.