Test to see if you are good hearted

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about families in poverty because a great deal of the folks we serve where I work are deeply engrained in a culture of poverty.  

Tucked away in Proverbs 29, is this verse (7):

The good-hearted understand what it’s like to be poor;
    the hardhearted haven’t the faintest idea.

When I first read this verse it almost sounds like the writer of Proverbs is suggesting that only the poor are good-hearted.   But I think it is much different than that.   The good hearted if they are not poor work hard to learn what it means to be poor.  They seek understanding and work towards it.      Having good and open hearts means WANTING to understand how a person could end up homeless without saying “they get what they get” or “why doesn’t he just get a job.”

It seems to me that as Christians we need to take it one step further — we need to be able to get close enough to understand.   Staying as far away from the poor as we can does not lead to understanding them.   Being around them, being with them, talking to them, even entering into relationships with them is what leads to understanding.

Some of you have the opportunity through your work to do this every day.  Others of us have to make the effort.  But it seems that the call to taking risks is a call to get close to those we don’t understand, in order to gain that understanding — the understanding that Proverbs suggests is what the good-hearted have obtained.