When I was 23 years old, through circumstances that still seem like some strange set of miracles or angel-nudges, I ended up living for a year with my husband in a village at the top of a Nicaraguan mountain. A Nicaraguan family we had known in the United States made the introductions that landed us there, two white 20-somethings without job descriptions. As we wept, laughed, vomited, hiked, sweated, machete-chopped, and tortilla-pounded through that year, I found myself in an intensive training school on what Jesus meant when he said, “Blessed are you who are poor” (Lk 6:20). But even as I learned what Jesus said to those who are poor, I learned that Jesus had something else to say to me. To Nicaraguans, I was wealthy, white, and from a nation that had militarily occupied their country in the early twentieth century. It took turning the page in my Bible to find what Jesus had to say about that.
Find the rest of this 8-minute read at The Biblical Mind.