I read a statistic this week from the U.S. Census bureau that said in Great Bend, nearly one in five people lives below the poverty line.
Translated into real numbers, this means that in a community of just under 15,000 people, more than 2,800 of them spend each day worrying about how they’re going to pay bills, put food on the table, and keep a roof over their heads. It is truly a stunning statistic.
Extended out a little further, as of 2020, close to 2,500 people in Kansas live without any roof over their heads whatsoever, including hundreds of families, veterans and youths. The total is up 16% from just 15 years ago.
These are not some far off problems. Every one of these more than 5,000 people in our community and our state has a face, a name and a story, and there’s a good chance you and I see them routinely going about our days, without even knowing it.
When I drop five or six bucks on a morning coffee on occasion, it is sobering when I think about how many families in my own backyard could use that same money to feed their families for just one more day.
Too often, we look at the headlines and think we have to go to some other city, or state, or far off country to be “on mission” and make a difference in somebody’s life. But these numbers tell a far different story. There are many in our own community in desperate need of caring people to be the hands and feet of Jesus every single day.
The faces in need are many and diverse, indiscriminate of age, race, gender or color of skin.
It is the single mother trying to save her children from an abusive relationship. It is the veteran living with deep scars no one can see. It is the recovering addict trying to break the chains of addiction and begin a new life. It is the youth lost in the system and crying out for help. It is the elderly without family close to care for their needs. It is the immigrant looking for the hope of a better life.
“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this,” James writes in James 1:27, “To visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”
The prophet Isaiah writes, “learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” (Isaiah 1:17, ESV)
There is so much work to do right in our own back yard – behind prison walls, in tents by the river, in the schools, the shelters, and on the street corners - we just have to have to have the eyes of compassion to see it, hearts of love to feel it, and the hands of Jesus to reach out and do it. If we have the ability to do something, we have the responsibility to do something.
I hope my own heart would not be cold, my ears not deaf to the cry, and my eyes not blind to the needs. Jesus saw the masses in physical and spiritual need and was moved with compassion.
And I pray the same would be true for each and every one of us.
Daniel Kiewel is a reporter for the Great Bend (Kan.) Tribune. He can be reached at dkiewel@gbtribune.com.
