Telling Your Precious Story and Listening to Others Will Revitalize Your Faith Five Day Bible Plan With Steve MorrisSample

Day Four: Listening to those who don’t have a voice

‘The Beatitudes begin to give us a clue. Blessed are the poor and the meek and the bereaved. Oddly, these are three groups who we rarely get to hear from. We walk by the poor on our streets and have no time to listen to them or be outraged by the injustices they have faced. The poor are voiceless in many ways. The meek are just that, meek. They find it hard to get a word in. The quiet people tend to get over-looked and drowned out by all the noisy people and egotists and narcissists who tend to have their say.’ (Steve Morris, Our Precious Lives [Milton Keynes: Authentic Media, 2020] p.130).

It maddens me that the weak seem not to have much of a voice – that a regular person’s life is somehow seen as less interesting than a famous person’s. But the Bible warns us about writing people off and being high-handed and immune to the suffering of others.

Look at the reading from Luke. It is the most sobering affair and quite scary in some ways. In the reading, the rich man who has ignored the story and suffering of a beggar outside his posh pad, is called to account by God. He wishes he had taken note of the beggar, but it is too late.

It is a wake-up call for us, to ditch our pride and our egos and to dignify others by taking notice of their stories and their sufferings. It is a way of conferring dignity on others.

Prayer: 

Help us to fight against the scandal of poverty and to work for the betterment of those whose voices are drowned out or not heard at all. Let us be a people who bring the stories of the dispossessed to the attention of the powerful. Help us to tenderly listen and to act. Let us never become hardened to injustice or poverty. Make us part of the solution and not the makers of the problems.