You too need to take time to discover your true identity. Once you discover that identity, make the deliberate choice to live in it. For example, if God created you to be a tractor, be the best tractor that you can be. But for many in our world we are not accepting of the tractor role. The tractor is not applauded, they just push through their work every day. So the tractor might check out NASCAR on television and feel a bit envious. The cars racing around the track get applauded, they live lives of adventure and get treated very well by the public. Even if the tractor decides to leave the farm and go to the NASCAR track and give a full effort to join the race they will likely fall short. No matter how hard the tractor works, studies or prays it is VERY unlikely that the tractor will ever compete with the racecars. Let us say though that you are the racecar. You love the roar of the crowd, and the publicity is great but you often wonder if there is more to life than going at breakneck speed in circles. One day you leave the track to go do a job with great purpose, you decide to plow the fields like a tractor. It is likely that you will not be equipped to get the fields plowed, seeded, fertilized and harvested. You would fail as a tractor no matter how many podcasts that you listen to, how hard you train or how many books you read.
Live in your real identity. For most of us on the front lines, actually spending time with those that are in poverty you are likely more like the tractor. If someone even notices what you do they are typically judging how you could do it better. They will share research that is has been gathered with much confirmation bias on how to serve these men and women. Some will point a finger in your chest and ask if you even love Jesus. Listen to these men and women, but do not take it to heart. They have never plowed a field. Their heart will not break when the man struggles with addiction dies on the bench of your workplace. They will blame you when someone commits suicide after staying at your facility even though you pleaded with them to get mental health help, that local agencies refused to give because their business model required them to be able to charge the government even though this person did not yet have state insurance approved. Do not take it personally.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” -Teddy Roosevelt
Your job, poverty warrior, is to love these men and women. Speak truth in love. Believe in their eternal best interest.
