A Prayer of the Stranger, the Widow, the Orphan, and the Poor

Not a sermon. A cry.

This one is a poem, and as a result is a bit different than my usual weekly article.

This week I want to let four voices speak for themselves instead of writing about them. The four voices the Scripture keeps naming together: the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor. So here goes.

Read it slow. (And out loud, if you can stand it.)

I am the stranger. Do you see me?

I crossed a border and became a category.

Back home I had a name. I was also a son who was his father’s pride or a woman who made her mother laugh so hard all the time. When I fled, I had to fit my whole life into a backpack, discarding the familiar, the safe, the comfort, and the security I had before.

They call me a line item now. I’m a risk. And others get to write the headline without ever asking me what actually happened.

They ask where I’m from like it’s a crime or a verdict, and my nervous, shaky voice is used against me as evidence. I make myself smaller in rooms to feel safer. It’s something I’ve gotten very good at. You would too if you had to reduce and minimize yourself to be safe.

God, you were a stranger once. Not symbolically, but actually. You too traveled an actual road at night, spent time fleeing and hiding, and experienced the same actual moments when the only safe place on the map happened to be the wrong country.

So when I tell you I am tired of explaining myself to people who have never once had to, I believe you know that tiredness because you once felt it in your own body, not just in your book.

Please don’t let me become mere paperwork to the people who could help me. My accent shouldn’t be the only thing they hear before they decide who I am. It would be enough to be seen as already whole. I carry the image of God, but nobody bothered to acknowledge that at the border.

Let me be a name again. Just once. Let someone say it right, and see me.

Do you see me?

✶

I am the widow who wants to be heard.

I used to be half of a sentence. Now I am the whole thing, and shorter than it used to be. That reduction haunts me.

Nobody warned me that grief comes with paperwork. Bank forms and insurance calls. A voice on hold thanking me for my patience while my patience is the only thing left that I haven’t already given away.

I go to the store and buy one of everything, and it isn’t enough, and it’s also too much.

I sit at church where we used to sit together. The weekly church bulletin email is still addressed to both of us because nobody’s gotten around to changing it. Some days that feels like mercy and some days it feels like a wound that keeps reopening on schedule. Yes, that hurts.

Defender of widows, that’s what they call you in the songs. I need it to be true today. As a phone call that I don’t have to make by myself. As someone in the third pew who still remembers my name after the casseroles stop coming and after the sympathy cards turn into silence. After everyone else’s life goes back to normal, while mine doesn’t, and never will again.

A rescue doesn’t make sense anymore. I already buried the person who would have been that. What I need now is a witness, someone who won’t let me disappear into insignificance.

Do you hear me?

✶

Call me an orphan but still love me.

I have been the extra chair and the extra place setting at three different tables. The awkwardness of a house that is not really mine.

People ask if I’m okay in the same tone they use for the weather. Fine, I say. Fine is a word I learned early, because the true answer takes too long. Nobody has that kind of time for a kid who isn’t theirs anyway.

I have a whole map memorized identifying which chairs are safe to sit in, and which rooms go quiet when I walk into them. Nobody else knows about that map because naming it would make it real. It’s already real enough.

Father is supposed to be the easiest word in the book, easy enough for other kids to say without thinking twice about it. For me it’s the one I’ve had to build from scratch out of vague ideas and other people’s descriptions. Board by board, and room by room. Like building a house without ever once having stood inside one. Without a single memory of what a dad’s steady hands are supposed to feel like or what it’s like to ride on a father’s shoulders.

Pity doesn’t keep anyone warm at night, and I’ve collected enough of it to know. What does help, though, is someone who stays past the point where staying stops being easy. Give me an ordinary weekday where nothing happens except someone chooses to still be there.

Lord, I want you to be the one who doesn’t leave. The one who doesn’t need reminding that I’m still here, still waiting, still hoping someone will ask not just if I’m okay, but who I actually am.

Do you love me?

✶

Will you count me even though I am poor?

I am not lazy, nor a lesson for others to learn from. And don’t point me out when you want to feel grateful for your own good luck.

I have worked jobs that broke my body for money and still ended up with not enough. The math on rent and medicine is done in my sleep over and over, and it still doesn't add up. Standing in long lines that told me my worth without a single word. The particular shame of counting exact change while somebody pretends not to watch.

Jesus said the poor would always be with us. For a long time, I thought that meant the math had already been given up on. I don’t think that anymore. It meant I shouldn’t dare get used to this.

What the poor want is simple. We want a system that wasn’t built to grind us down. And people who notice and say something when it grinds anyway.

Do you count me? Or am I just the math nobody wants to do?

✶

We are the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the poor.

Will you see us. Will you hear us. Will you love us. Will you count us.

We are not the same story. But we are the same question, asked into the same silence, from four different voices.

Do you hear us. Do you see us. Will you say our situation out loud, by name, the way the prophets used to. Or will you just manage us with softer words and longer meetings.

We are not asking you to feel bad about the light you have. We are asking you to bring some of it in here.

Act justly. Love mercy. Walk into the room and stay long enough to learn our names and use them.

Will you see us, hear us, love us, and count us.

✶

If one of these four voices was yours this week, I hope this prayer found you.