“Counting the poor is an exercise in the art of the possible. For deciding who is poor, prayers are more relevant than calculation because poverty, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder.” writes Mollie Orshansky in a 1969 article entitled “Perspectives on poverty 2: How poverty is measured”. Orshansky was an American economist, the daughter of Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants, whose work in the 1960s helped the U.S. Government define their thresholds for poverty.

Money and poverty are touchy subjects. Perhaps now more than ever in our developed Western society, as the economic squeeze continues to squeeze, relationships not only across social classes, but now more and more across the generations are becoming fractured over the issue. At the time of writing this reflection, there have been two articles on the BBC News about it, one of which lead me to discover the above quote.

I realised what an important point this quote brings out, and how the inverse of this statement is also true.

Riches lie in the eye of the beholder, too.

Around 7 years ago, I spent 10 days in Ethiopia visiting a project run by Stand by Me, a charity we support as a family. While I was there, I had the opportunity to meet the child that we sponsor. I saw him at school for a few days, and then I was taken to his house to meet his family.

He was 6 years old at the time, and we walked with him back to his house from his school. It was around 45 minutes walk, on rough roads, which he did daily alone. His mother could not do the journey any more and so he learnt the route, packed his own bag up and off he went. We arrived at the hut - which was a mud hut, with a corrugated metal panel which acted as a door.

Our spare room has a pile of boxes that we’re ignoring, left over from when we moved in and never unpacked them. Chatting to some friends recently, I realised that they’ve also got a spare room full of boxes that were never unpacked. Which is ridiculous.

We’ve got so much stuff that we either don’t have room for, or we’ve not even needed since moving house, so it’s just sitting forgotten in a box, replaced by more stuff that we’ve since bought.

Our lives can feel a bit like our spare room. We live in a materialistic society that is constantly screaming at us to buy more, earn more, have more, be more…but when we work and work to accumulate more and more stuff to insulate ourselves with, we push God out- our lives full of stuff mean that there’s no room for God.

Last week, I met an asylum seeker family who came into our church in Blackpool. They had fled persecution, carrying very little but their faith and a hope for safety. Their journey was marked by trauma and loss, yet their trust in God remained unshaken. Hearing their story, I felt compelled to act—not out of abundance, but from a heart convicted by Jesus’s call to serve.

We can easily fall into unacceptable ways of thinking about people by adopting bad examples displayed in the world around us.

Those set by social media perhaps or by our past experiences. Our own limited perception of what is good or acceptable behaviour comes into play instead of thinking more deeply about God’s standards.