Poverty

Poverty rightly has an unhappy reputation, unpopular among all peoples.  It soaks into everything related to the persons found in poverty, and remains in the corners of virtually all adults as a siren of calamity for those not enveloped by it.  It forms us in many ways, psychologically, materially, status, family, health, values, and the story extends.  The mystery is that mankind, with adequate resources and knowledge has not addressed the matter to solution that would relieve the burdens of massive numbers of poor people.

Permit me to tell a story – my own.  I am the product of a poor home, but I don’t feel I was deprived in that life emerged well for me.  There were deprivations: in the limited resources that we worked around in the standard needs of society, assisted at first by a bit of public charity.  I did spend a short time in an orphan’s home, but overjoyed when returned to my mother.  She remarked that I returned to her with far better clothing than when I was taken to the home.  I remember standing in line while we charity children were having tonsils removed on the production line – one after the other as fast as the physicians could manage.  I had no live-in father (through omission in his tuberculosis to death far away, therefore unknown to the three children of our mother, and the loss of some family nurture pointing toward maturity); in little faith/life activity that would instill values and some understanding of human nature to be encountered and managed.  I yearned for a sense of my own normality falling into carnality in choosing habits, attitudes, thoughts and relationships) and, in a belief that wealth, even if modest, would answer problems I witnessed and felt in our life context.  The prevailing context was secular and limited.  No one in mother’s rooming/boarding house went to church.  Only two of mother’s boarders had gone to college, and neither of those two modeled some life ideals.  Several of the hard-working men had cars.  One of the young men appeared to have hopes for education and a career.  He was kidded about his ways by the other roomers, and was unwise in his attitudes related to the peasants of the house.  (He ended up in New York scheduling programs for artists in music, and made something of a success in a self–reduced context for his life.)

There were positive factors.  Mother was a role model in her habits, concern for others, and clear determination that she would permit nothing to prevent her from providing for her children until their majority.  We were admittedly poor, but would not be permitted to act like it.  It was admitted that youngsters needed some money, but allowance was unknown for me.  We had to work for what we wanted.  A list of jobs would be long.  I was determined to always have enough money to buy a fried egg sandwich and a glass of milk – for 15 cents.  I well remember the day when it cost 16 cents – the first day of sales tax in Ohio, but the kindly server promised that in three years the law would be repealed.  His promise never materialized.  Eighty plus years later it has more than doubled.  There was always the positive accent in our home, and mother instilled the idea that an education would lift her children from the drudgery she had experienced and managed.  We had relatives even poorer than we.  They believed us lucky in having store-bought bread for lunches.  (Mother’s boarders preferred her biscuits and cornbread.)  In this context, including more than is noted here, I became as did most of my acquaintances, something of a neutral person with some feeling I would try do better in life than those around me.

It was then that Christ was introduced to my life.  Overnight my values shifted.  The contribution of my teachers from public school, the influence of good friends, the ambitions born in part from my mother’s nurturing and my serious nature, the encouragement of adults that seemed interested in me, and most of all, the discovery of the meaning of Christ to personal and social life changed me, likely concluded within me what I could envision for myself.  The concepts of popularity (some celebrity perception), of money collection (some feeling of material worth), of power (to be seen and conjured as better than some others), of intellect (to be smarter than friends) – all faded in the vision that I wanted to live in the will and plan of God for my life.  I prayed he would guide my way, and studied Scripture to discover God’s values.