Blessed are the Poor? No Way!

I have been teaching in Kids' Club from the Sermon on the Mount and talking about the beatitudes.  They seem like simple statements, but when you take time to really think about what Jesus is saying you realize that these are hard things.

When I told the kids Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor," they looked at me like I was crazy.  People probably looked at Jesus the same way.  Poor people are blessed?  Really?

I recently read Philip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew, and he had some interesting things to say about Jesus' teachings.  Here is the passage about this beatitude:

"Catholic scholars coined the phrase 'God's preferential option for the poor' to describe a phenomenon they found throughout both the Old and New Testaments:  God's partiality toward the poor and the disadvantaged.  Why would God single out the poor for special attention over any other group?  I used to wonder.  What makes the poor deserving of God's concern?  I received help on this issue from a writer named Monika Hellwig, who lists the following 'advantages' to being poor:

          1.  The poor know they are in urgent need of redemption.
          2.  The poor know not only their dependence on God and on powerful people but also their
               interdependence with one another.                  
          3.  The poor rest their security not on things but on people.
          4.  The poor have no exaggerated sense of their own importance, and no exaggerated
               need of privacy.
          5.  The poor expect little from competition and much from cooperation.
          6.  The poor can distinguish between necessities and luxuries. (I am adding...except in the US.)
          7.  The poor can wait because they have acquired a kind of dogged patience born of
               acknowledged dependence.
          8.  The fears of the poor are more realistic and less exaggerated because they already
               know that one can survive great suffering and want.
          9.  When the poor have the Gospel preached to them, it sounds like good news and
               not like a threat or a scolding.
          10.  The poor can respond to the call of the Gospel with a certain abandonment and
               uncomplicated totality because they have so little to lose and are ready for anything."

Yancey also suggests turning these around like this...
           1.  The rich DO NOT KNOW that they are in urgent need of redemption.

And so forth.

This will give you something to think about.  I am wrestling with what I think I am supposed to do with all these ideas.  How should I live in the light of what I'm reading?  How do I set an example of how to live for the kids in Kids' Club?