The topic of this year’s Blog Action Day is poverty. Bloggers, podcasters, and videocasters around the world–11,000 strong and counting–are approaching the subject in myriad ways, and the B.A.D. site offers 88 ways (some ways more well advised than others) to be the change for poverty’s sake. 

I never knew poverty as a child, but only because of the care of local churches that surrounded my family in each place we lived. For reasons I won’t go into here, we moved constantly until I was 13, and could barely afford any of the places we lived–and some years, only had a place to live because of the kindness of friends or strangers. I remember bags of groceries showing up at our door, timely envelopes with cash delivered just as the pantry went dry. I don’t think I ever missed a meal, because the people around us took seriously the biblical injunction to care for those in need. 

Poverty is an issue that is so astoundingly complex in causes and solutions, and so broad and unknowable in terms of scope, that those of us who haven’t devoted our lives to the cause usually think and act very little for poverty’s sake. But for Christians, thinking about poverty, praying for the poor, and reshaping our lives for service to the poor should be basic, elemental, natural parts of our witness. Tom Davis, the president of the orphan care organization Children’s Hope Chest, recently wrote a quick list of ways to care for the needy (accompanied by a gauntlet-throwing essay, “Why Christians Suck,” about how so few of us do these things). As Tom admonishes us to remember, actions on behalf of the poor shouldn’t be something we have to rally ourselves to perform; they should be the very reflexes of our faith.