Proverbs 19:4 says that wealth makes many friends, but the poor is separated from his friend. According to an article in the Oregonian Mayor Adams will spend twenty million dollars on bike paths.
When my sons first moved out on their own two of them shared an apartment. They had every cable channel you could get, but they didn't own a frying pan. Is today, right now, when so many are struggling to survive and hold off despair a good time to spend twenty million dollars on bike paths?
Proverbs 14:20 says the poor are disliked even by their neighbors, but the rich have many friends. Whether you believe Scripture has anything to say to you or not, is this not true? What's in our heart dictates our attitude toward others. Comfort, security, pleasure, and familiarity with these things create a need for more of the same. They dull the senses and make us less and less sensitive to the plight of others.
Sin is an ugly, archaic word that has no place in our modern and post-modern world. When our inner disposition, shaped, even controlled by the things we desire, the things that own us, creates choices whose outer expression is focused on us, we bad.
In many places this would go by unnoticed, but in Portland, where time after time we witness people jumping in to help others it strikes me as short sighted, calloused, mean spirited, oh hell, just say it, it strikes me as sin.
In a later article I read this in the Oregonian.
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