In the last month, I’ve encountered a concerning number of dead animals on the street. I have almost stepped on rats and pigeons, each at differing degrees of decay. Sometimes, New York feels like a glorified trash heap. We’ve also had some positively beautiful days: lilac skies, lush greenery, warm nights that feel alive. New York is like that. It somehow manages to be simultaneously so grotesque and so beautiful, the best and the worst city in the world to live in. I think E. B. White captures it well in his essay Here Is New York:
Every facility is inadequate―the hospitals and schools and playgrounds are overcrowded, the express highways are feverish, the unimproved highways and bridges are bottlenecks; there is not enough air and not enough light, and there is usually either too much heat or too little. But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin―the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.¹
I have experienced this very phenomenon myself. This was my first summer in New York, and I understand now why people grow tired of the city. You start to daydream, while carrying a full load of groceries on foot in the summer heat, what it would be like to live in the suburbs and drive to the store. Moving is extra complicated―especially when the bookshelves you bought secondhand don’t fit inside a minivan and must be carried up several blocks, down into the subway, through a turnstile, and onto a train. Then there is the cost of rent, the cost of living, and the ubiquity of rats and roaches.
But for all its grime and inconvenience, New York is enchanting. It is a city of remarkable warmth and charm. The magic is most electric at particular places and times: watching an early summer sunset on the shores of the Hudson River, lying down in the quiet meadows of Central Park, hearing live jazz one snowy December night downtown. That feeling strikes at random on ordinary days, too, in the moments I remember I am living in the New York City. I am enamored with New York, or maybe the idea of New York, which is, in the words of Joan Didion, “an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”² I think she is right when she says that it is a dream that exists exclusively in the West and the South, where New York is too distant to be real or plausible.
Like Didion, I came to New York from the West, young, captivated by its mythos. My initial taste for the city was dampened by homesickness, but by the end of my sophomore year of college, New York was my personal promised land. I had reached the golden shore. In my last week in the city before going home for the summer, I wanted to stretch each moment into an eternity. I was struck by the relentless beat of time. I hated how temporary the present was.³ I spent each day of my week bathing in fresh sunlight, traversing the city alone, imagining a forever life in New York. When I returned in September at the end of summer, I felt like I was home.
The year after I fell in love with New York―this past year―the city lost some of its romance. Burnout made New York significantly less magical. Like any place, it seems like heaven on earth when life is good and hell when life is hard. It is easy enough to attribute my mood, my satisfaction with life, my sense of self to the place in which I am living. Yet it made me wonder if I was destined to one day flunk out of the city. It is a secret and silly point of pride to me that I love New York when so many hate it. So sometimes I am afraid that I have fallen in love with only a glamor and one day I will wake up to the brutality of this city and find that I was a fool for seeing something more. I am haunted by Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That,” which sets out to explain why she left New York―to describe “the moment it ended.”⁴ She, too, was once young and in love with New York. Then months turned to years and the party went on too long.
I am beginning to understand. Here is a city of paradoxes, of incongruities. It’s not just the sidewalks and the parks. It’s the people, the poverty, the apartments. New York is the home of the wealthy and the homeless. It has the highest population of homelessness of all cities in the U.S. It’s also where celebrities, influencers, and investment bankers flock. It is “a city for only the very rich and the the very poor.”⁵
I suppose I fit more in the category of very rich. I don’t consider myself wealthy, but I am, after all, living in one of the most expensive cities in the world and not on its streets. Wealth is relative―there will always be someone richer and always someone poorer. But I have learned that because I do not have to worry about food for the day or shelter for the night, I might as well be very rich. Wealthy or not, the reality is that I have more―more money, more agency, more resources―than many of the people that I walk by each day. What is my responsibility to them? What am I to do with the much that God has given to me? Surely, I must share.
You must remember that care for the poor is commanded again and again in the Bible. If you are a Christian, let us both do away with silly excuses that exist only to relieve our consciences. Israel was commanded to leave gleanings from their harvest “for the poor and for the sojourner” (Lev. 23:22), to “open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor” (Deut. 15:11). Proverbs 21:13 says, “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.” The prophets leveled stunning charges against God’s people for failing to fulfill these commands.⁶ Jesus showed great concern for the poor. In the sermon on the mount, he instructed his disciples, “Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you” (Matt. 5:42). The apostles cared for the poor: James provides a searing rebuke of those who would claim faith in Christ but fail to show the fruit of saving faith. Evidence of faith, to James, must include more than caring for the poor, but surely not less (Jas. 2:15–17).
Any one of these pieces of Scripture should be enough by itself to convince us that it is incumbent upon every Bible-believing Christian to take seriously the call to look after the poor and needy. A single imperative from Scripture, clearly understood, ought to be enough for us. Yet even so, caring for the poor appears throughout the Bible, in both testaments and across genres. Repetition calls us to pay attention.
To be clear, caring for the poor does not save you. And this action will not preserve or sanctify believers. The only way to salvation is by trusting in Jesus Christ, who was crucified, died, and rose on our behalf. The core story of the gospel―the life, death, and resurrection of Christ―is essential. Yet care for the poor is still important. I suppose this instruction appears so often in God’s Word because, like every one of his commands, it is reflective of his character. We learn, through God’s concern for the poor, that he is a compassionate, merciful, gentle, providing God. We learn of his justice on behalf of the needy. We learn that he notices and cares deeply for the marginalized and forgotten of this world.
We see that he desires to use his people as a means of mercy to others. More often than not, even when his provision is miraculous, he uses the slow means of believers collecting money for the poor (Rom. 15:26), of a prophet assuring a widow that her food will not run out (1 Kgs. 17:14), of a tax collector giving half of his goods to the poor (Luke 19:8). These encounters are personal. God uses his own children to provide his own provision. He involves the heart and will of the giver. He cares not only that the poor are provided for, but that his own people are the kind of people who provide for the poor.
So one of the hardest parts of New York is that it shows you that you are certainly not the kind of person who generously, regularly, and willingly provides for the poor―or at least, you are not this kind of person naturally. One might hope that the visibility of homelessness and poverty in the city would make its inhabitants far more compassionate. Perhaps that is the case for some people. I do not think it is for most. In my experience, a few weeks go by and already you are used to walking past people on the streets and ignoring beggars in subway cars. They become a feature of the city, a part of the white noise, an occasional inconvenience. They become, so easily, so awfully―if we are honest―less than human.
It is that or emotional exhaustion. That is the choice we eventually all make: care too much or numb it away. Let your heart break ten times a day or harden it. Look or ignore. Care or don’t. It is just too much in a city like New York, where it is very likely you will encounter multiple homeless people every time you travel so much as a block. How are you supposed to care for every single one? What does that mean practically, with finite time and money? Questions like these are hard and uncomfortable, and it is often most convenient to forget that we ever had them.
At times, the discomfort of my conscience has filled me with the overwhelming desire to leave New York. It gets to me especially on days with bad weather, when I am already tired of this or that condition, and then I see someone far less fortunate than I, and I am reminded that I have a warm bed and a roof and the means to feed myself every day, and they do not. Then I just want to live in some quiet, nice suburb where the streets are empty at night and the lights go out early when the whole neighborhood goes to bed. There, I would not have to think about my obligation to the poor. I would not have to see my own stinginess and lack of trust in the Lord on full display. I would not have to wonder about every person and how God sees them and why I get so many earthly comforts in this life. I would not have to wrestle with the question of whether they know the Lord.⁷
Other times, I am overwhelmed by the injustice of it all. I don’t understand how Wall Street works, but I do know that huge sums of money float through the hands of the rich every day, money whose only purpose is to generate more wealth for the people who seem to need it least. This city of disparity is outrageous. The lady on the subway is asking for a dollar to buy a birthday gift for her daughter, a few bucks toward a warm meal. The man on the sidewalk is begging for a coffee. There is simultaneously so much need and so very little.
Then I think about myself and how comfortable I am. Dare I forget how privileged I am to attend a private university, to study classics and worry only halfheartedly about my postgrad prospects? Dare I forget that I have enough margin to give to the poor, to be more generous than I am? If not for a series of events out of my control―my parents’ choices, the place I grew up in, the opportunities handed to me―I would be in the same place as anyone else on the streets. Why am I not more generous? So I am reminded that I am a sinner who needs mercy. I am a sinner who is greedy, fearful, and selfish by nature. I am, by myself, as helpless and needy as the beggar on the street. And I am, by myself, as cold-hearted as the wealthiest person in the world who cares not for others.
This is why our world is the way it is―why, no matter how many programs and policies and organizations there are, we always end up again with inequity. Some suffer while others thrive. As long as our world is sinful, as long as I am a sinner, this world will be broken. It is as Jesus said: “you always have the poor with you” (Mark 14:7).
Jesus wasn’t discouraging us from giving. As long as this world is sinful and fallen, we will still have sickness and disaster and war and misfortune. As Christians, we still consider it worth our time to pursue healing and repair and peace and aid. We don’t think any of these goods or fixes will be forever; we don’t expect to solve the problem of death―not in this lifetime and not in this age. We do good not because it will be perfect, eternal good. Neither do we do good because we are afraid of going to hell. We do good in and to this world because we want to please our God and because we want to reflect his character.
You see, the whole question of why give to the poor is really just asking why we do good. One day, you and I will both be dead, and still, if Christ has not yet returned, there will be the poor to feed and clothe. It is so easy to look at a city as big as New York and give up. What’s the use of stopping for one homeless person when there are millions more? Why give someone a meal today when they’ll be hungry again tomorrow? Why do any good when tomorrow we are faced with the same needs? How are we supposed to give generously when the tide is too high to surmount?
God doesn’t give us a formula: give to one out of every three people you encounter; give food but not cash; give twice a day or twice a week or only when you have time. A formula would make it too easy to give our due and feel righteous enough, immune from the suffering and the guilt of this messy world. Rather, I think God gave me New York and all its hard, unanswerable questions so I would finally begin to face the reality of a messy world, a cursed world, a groaning world. There is no magic spell, no secret wisdom that will solve the problem of pain, of haves and have-nots. God gave me New York so I would understand how dark and deep sin lies within the walls of this city and within my own heart. He gave me New York to give me a holy discontentment with this world and a longing for my true home.
The year I fell in love with New York, I thought I found home. I thought I had arrived. I found out, just one year later, just how exhausting and complicated the city could be. I feared that, like Joan Didion, one day the magic would wear off and I would quiet quit New York. I feared that one day New York would end just as quickly and dramatically as it began.
It did end―not when I felt the first pang of longing for the suburbs and not when I began to wonder why we give to the poor in a fallen world. New York―the New York I dreamt about―ended all the way back in the garden, in Genesis 3. It ended long before I or any other human arrived. That New York, a city shining, free, dreamt of but never seen, will one day begin again. And this New York, a city marred by death, mourning, crying, and pain, will one day be counted among the former things. Until then, I am a pilgrim in this New York, this strange, sin-pocked, sad city with many needs, many common graces, and many reasons to cry out, “Come, Lord Jesus!”
E. B. White, Here Is New York (Harper and Brothers, 1949), 26.
Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 231.
I wrote a blog post about the movement of time and our longing for eternity.
Didion, “Goodbye to All That,” 225.
Didion, “Goodbye to All That,” 227.
Among many examples, see Isa. 3:14–15; 10:2; 58:7; Ezek. 22:29; Amos 2:7; 4:1; 5:11; 8:4; Zech. 7:10.
Anecdotally, every homeless person I have asked whether they know Jesus has said yes―with various understandings of who he is and what he came to do for them.