Recently I read and was moved by someone’s life journey growing up as they detailed out a single mom doing the best she could for her babies.
This had to be back before government-assisted days as today.
Their mom was a Christian lady and worked two jobs to provide for them. They walked to church because church was everything.
They recounted how one Sunday the pastor made an appeal for every family to save for a month for a special offering to be given to a poor family, without giving out the name.
The mother told her children they would cut back every way they could to participate in the offering and help that poor family.
They remembered their mother making drastic plans to improvise a way to help by buying a sack of potatoes to eat as their main dish and sitting in the dark with a candle to cut their electric bill, just so they could give something.
This person recollected making potholders to sell for a dollar and at the end of the month they had a decent amount of money to give that Sunday, something around $50.
On the walk to church that morning it was raining, but they went anyway, and when the pan was passed for the special love offering, they all were proud to place their hard-earned cash in it.
That afternoon the pastor drove up and handed their mom a white envelope with $71 in it, the sum total of the special offering, because they were the poor family he wanted to help.
The person telling this story said their mother had never told them they were poor. She just raised them in love and determination to be thankful for what they had.
Embarrassed, their mom thanked the pastor, but that next church service a missionary visiting made an appeal for $100 to build a small church house somewhere across the ocean, and she placed all $71 in the same pan.
The bulk of the love offering and missionary appeal came from this poor family.
The person recounting this noble upbringing had a lesson in poverty.
That’s their story, this is mine. I can relate.
My parents never told my siblings and me we were poor either, but looking back I know better. We were poor but didn’t know it.
It’s been said you can be poor but not have poor ways. That’s so true because I had hands-on training by my parents.
My dad and mom never had a lot of money to show. Both of them threw their shoulders to the wheel to provide for us.
Dad was a lifelong minister and moved us around a lot establishing churches as a pioneer preacher. Thus he was never able to be a full-time pastor and live off of the tithes like most pastors and families do these days and as I did for 36 years.
He and Mom tried their hand at a dry-cleaning business starting when I was a little thing. For four or five years Dad offered free pickup and delivery and was making a good show as he did double time pastoring the small congregation of Talley’s Chapel.
It was a flash in the pan of prosperity, but it didn’t last long because dad was too kind-hearted, and credit sank that ship.
I remember him later working on a pipeline dragging creosote timbers off a flatbed truck, slave work, when I was about 8 years old. Coming home he was cooked by the sun and creosote that coated his arms and neck.
Mother sold Avon back then, and I also remember after Dad moved us to California he tried to provide any way he could by selling Fuller brushes and Rainbow vacuum cleaners.
But again, his soft-heartedness would not let him con people into buying his expensive products.
He even tried his hand at helping build spec houses while out there in Ontario, Calif., until he resumed pastoring, and worked at a grocery store in the Arizona border town of Ajo.
Yes, I can relate to this story I read because we, too, were tested in poverty. But like the single mom, my parents never told us we were poor or made us feel that way. They just loved Jesus when they had some money and they loved Jesus when they didn’t.
Tested in poverty.
While a pastor as a young man, I remember one day being stopped in the driveway of our home after putting out the trash. A grandfather who attended our church stopped with his teen grandson he was raising who was being rebellious and headed in the wrong direction.
As the three of us stood in my driveway, the garbage truck pulled up and two convicts dressed in orange jumpsuits got off the back to get my garbage. I pointed to the scene and said, “Samuel, if you don’t listen to your grandfather, I see you wearing an orange jumpsuit on the back of that garbage truck.”
Thankfully the young man made necessary corrections, obeyed his grandfather and went on to be a fine family man to this day.
May this discourse today help someone who is down in this world’s goods to be encouraged, especially if you have children still at home or grands who dote on you.
You are making a huge impact even if you don’t know it.
Like that single mom, like my dad, like that grandfather, hold your head up high and walk on, because you are making a difference in somebody’s life.
Tested in poverty.
God bless you and God bless America.
