Lessons from the Poor

from an article by Wayne Cordeiro:

...I asked, “How can I pray for you? What do you want the most?”

“Pray that we become like you,” was their immediate request. “We do not have freedom of religion. We only have a few registered churches, and the rest cannot attend. We are a persecuted Church. Pray that we can soon be like you!”

“I cannot do that,” I sadly replied. “I will not pray for you in that way.”

“But why?” They pushed back on my seemingly unchristian response.

“You came here after riding thirteen hours on a train. In America, if church is more than thrity-minutes away, people will not go. It’s too far. You have been sitting on a wooden floor without air-conditioning for two days to hear the Word of the Lord. Where I come from, if you cannot sit on cushioned chairs and be in the comfort of air-conditioning, people will find better things to do. You don’t have adequate Bibles, so you memorize what you can gather. In every Christian home, we have an average of three Bibles, but we don’t read any of them.

“No, I will not pray that you become like us. But I will pray that we become like you!”

Sometimes we learn the most from those who have the least. We realize that when we are rich, we are often the poorest, and when we are the poor, that is often when we are the richest!