As I continued to walk in spirit, I started to gain a good vantage point of a Christian’s inner life. I enjoyed observing Christ work in the lives of other believers. But the “Christ glow”, as they call it, is not observable like a physical trait. It’s measured in a different manner — only perceptible through the Christian’s many actions and intentions, and are so distinct from the world that one cannot help but question the motivation.
You’d imagine it getting incrementally easier to give away wealth the more you make. But that hasn’t been true for my own life. Tithes aside, I haven’t quite gotten around physically being with poor. And how can you be concerned for people with this stigmatized label without knowing them personally? I’ll let you in on this lie I’ve caught myself telling: “Once the time is right, I’ll start to work for the cause of the poor”.
Bullshit. It’s only recently that I’ve given myself a good callout. It’s a lie because my sights have been misaligned. It’s incredibly easy to add to an ever growing list of things to serve my needs. The more I place myself in the camp of ‘needing of something new’, the more self-serving I become. And the more self-serving I become, the harder it becomes to serve the need of others.
So I’m not working for the poor now because I’ve been thinking “how nice this would be”, and “how nice that would be” and yadi-yadi-yah instead of truly acting on those possibilities of serving because I don’t know anyone’s needs but my own. But have I not enough? Have all my basic needs not been satisfied?
Part of self-denial is being able to identify the line in which all basic needs have been met. Of course there’s no doubt it varies from person to person. What I believe the Christian ethic aims to do is this: to inculcate a sense of common satisfaction. The more you fall in love with the Lord, the more this satisfaction grows. To be genuinely concerned for poor to the point of action, then, becomes an outcome from not only crossing that line but also recognizing said line has been crossed.
Have you truly met that line yet?