I feel blessed to be a part of so many beautiful communities.
I feel blessed to be able to go to school. And not just primary school. But secondary school. And now university.
I feel blessed to have access to food, and clean water, and health care.
I feel blessed to have the opportunity to travel. To be here right now.
But to call these things blessings from God, I think, creates some kind of dichotomy.
Because how can we have a God who is LOVE but who has chosen to bless some while leaving others without basic necessities: food, water, clothing, housing, community, etc.?
I think that maybe it's time we stop calling our privilege a blessing and start calling it what it really is. Privilege.
I'm afraid that until we are willing to do this, and until we realize that God did not will some to be rich and others poor, we will remain complacent.
When we reject the idea that we have what God wants us to have--that everyone has what God has willed them to have--only then will we be able to truly start loving our neighbors as ourselves. Because only then will we truly grasp the injustice and horror of the inequality that exists in our world. Once we truly understand that the world is far from how it should be, we will be drawn into the mess of it all and we will (hopefully) feel convicted to join Christ in the building of his kingdom here on earth.
Our liberation is tied up with the liberation of every other human being. Until each person is free from oppression, violence, hunger, discrimination, injustice, we will not be free either.
I think that this is what it means to carry the cross of Christ. It means to love the ones society has deemed unlovable. To feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Visit the imprisoned. But to not leave it at that. It is to deconstruct the power structures that are causing people to live in poverty, that are causing people to be deemed unlovable. It is rejecting our own positions of power, our security, to enter into love.
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."
-Helder Camara
