One Man's "White Trash"…

you wear ripped sweatpants and a stained looney tunes t-shirt
matching the stained faces of your sleepy toddlers
you drag to wal-mart at 11 pm
to buy wonder bread and mayo
and check the ATM
to find
the current “man of the house”
drained your account
on beer again

you, at least, can balance the checkbook
even though you dropped out of school
when you were 17
you, at least, don’t drink away
your re-occurring nightmares
of your uncle raping you

every day at 4:30
Oprah is a loyal friend
it makes you cry because
for half an hour you feel like
you are not alone
in your cigarette smoke filled single wide
with your flea bitten mutt
and bills piled to the roof

they say Jesus will never leave you
but don’t bother to ask
if your kids are fed
or treated right
or where that bruise on your left arm came from
or that hollow look in your eyes

I wrote this because even though I say I believe God loves everyone with the same passionate, unconditional love that he loves me, I still judge those I don’t even know. I still choose to believe this caste system we don’t want to admit exists in America, a country where “All men are created equal.”

If we are really going to live a life of love and be the church God has called us to be, we are really going to have to grasp this, on a day to day basis, in our home town, not just on some foreign “mission field”