Love the Poor

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to love others like Jesus loves them. I am teaching a junior high girls class at church and we are studying a book called Being a Girl Who Loves. I'm sure I'm learning as much as the girls are, if not more. One topic that I have been considering the last few days is loving the poor and what that means for us today. Jesus told us to love the poor. I think we (by we I mean I) tend to replace that word love with judge. We feel it is our job to judge whether or not they have a worthy reason for being poor, and then based on that judgment we decide if we can love them or not. John and I frequently drive to Missoula on the weekends. Every time we go there is a man standing on the corner in front of Wal-Mart with a sign asking for money. Every week we drive by and I judge him, thinking he should just get a job. Maybe he should just get a job, but Jesus says love him, he doesn't say judge him. In Marion we lived across the street from a group of guys we were honestly scared of. Being a young woman, I was afraid to be at home alone. I was judging them. Maybe I was correct in my judgments, but that is not what I was supposed to be doing; I was to be loving. Occasionally these men would come over to use our phone, and once they asked for money. One particular man John really was able to establish a relationship with. He started coming over to borrow the phone, and then he would stay and talk. This happened often when I was not even home. John played his guitar for him and he loved it. He played worship music, and sometimes the man asked for prayer and John was able to pray for him. I think that this is what it means to love the poor, but considering we lived there for a year we did very little loving of these men. I only know the name of the one man who frequented our house. I never took the time to meet any of the other men, or even the random kids who played in the yard. What an opportunity we had. Its not like we didn't do anything, but I just keep thinking of how much more we could have loved these people. I also keep thinking that if I were to move back to the same apartment, I probably still wouldn't do anything. How hard it can be to love strangers, escecially strangers who are so different from us. I have a hard time leaving my comfort zone, but yet that is exactly what we are called to do.