Growth About those poor...

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Being really poor is slow torture.

The bible says that "poverty is the destruction of the poor" and i say that Poverty has harmed more already then riches ever will.
I often wonder about people i see who are living on the street. After all, they didnt begin there, and yet, here they are...
So.....What happened?..... As certainly at one point nearly all of them had a better life, and maybe a home, and opportunities, and success.....Yet, here they are now with the sleeping bag and the tobacco for breakfast and the impossible life.

What i try to do is remember that no matter why they are there, its a HARD LIFE, and we should give to them every time.

Recently i was looking at a young man on the street, who was leaning against the side of my local WalMart Superstore.
He had a beard, was wearing moccasins and fatigues. I drove up near him and waved him over and tried to hand him a bit of cash and he didnt want to take it. So, i insisted, and told him "it'll make me feel good for you to have it".... And that is a perfectly legitimate point, as it not only true, its scriptural...."its more blessed to give then to receive".

I invite you to take every opportunity you can to give money to all the poor in your city, (when given the opportunity) = no matter what. = Proverbs 19:17

We are the most like God, when we give.


<K><

thanks for this. poverty destroys people. its not just the lack of "stuff," its...the stigma that goes with low status, the way poor people are treated, etc. I'm glad you're generous with people. I live in The Bible Belt ("1,000 miles wide, 1 inch deep"). Its...crazy. We have more people, as a % of the population, than many other parts of the US...and man oh man...southern culture is rough on poor people. Add in social and economic factors that make upward mobility much harder than many other parts of the nation, and you're left basically with a caste system...and the people at the bottom of the caste are "kept in line," etc. and basically punished for their very existence.

Matthew 25:34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: 35 For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: 36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. 37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? 38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? 39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? 40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Kidron said:

-
Being really poor is slow torture.

The bible says that "poverty is the destruction of the poor" and i say that Poverty has harmed more already then riches ever will.
I often wonder about people i see who are living on the street. After all, they didnt begin there, and yet, here they are...
So.....What happened?..... As certainly at one point nearly all of them had a better life, and maybe a home, and opportunities, and success.....Yet, here they are now with the sleeping bag and the tobacco for breakfast and the impossible life.

What i try to do is remember that no matter why they are there, its a HARD LIFE, and we should give to them every time.

Recently i was looking at a young man on the street, who was leaning against the side of my local WalMart Superstore.
He had a beard, was wearing moccasins and fatigues. I drove up near him and waved him over and tried to hand him a bit of cash and he didnt want to take it. So, i insisted, and told him "it'll make me feel good for you to have it".... And that is a perfectly legitimate point, as it not only true, its scriptural...."its more blessed to give then to receive".

I invite you to take every opportunity you can to give money to all the poor in your city, (when given the opportunity) = no matter what. = Proverbs 19:17

We are the most like God, when we give.


<K><

Click to expand...

Not only is poverty torture but the poor have few friends. Thanks for this reminder.

Poverty does have it's good side. Growing up in the USA or other "rich" nation and have so-far made it through the economical system...that is, always had a job, never went to bed hungry, and so on.....it's hard to understand the good side.

The church I attend sends people to Haiti. They help them build, dig, they help them with medical assessments and talk about Jesus...you know what I mean if your church supports foreign ministries.

So, these "missionaries" return home and speak of the great joy and love they have for Christ.....more often than not surpassing our own love and joy. Why? I can open my refrigerator and pull out my favorite COLD beer. I can turn on my faucet and get clean running water. My house is warm in the winter and AC'd in the summer. I went to school and walked on dry tiled floors....I think we get the picture...
But, because of their poverty they appreciate every little thing....praising God for a cup of water or a clean shirt. Shoes.

What do I do? I take it all for granted. We don't see Gods hand or providence in the simple things. The poor in these 3rd world countries do...or so I've been told. That's good for them and "bad" for us that have it all. I don't now if I ever thanked, praised God, for being able to go to the faucet, fill a clean glass with water..adding ice from my freezer the squeezing a fresh lemon wedge into it.

In those countries the poor become rich and we the rich become poor. The christians in those countries expect miracles while we are taught in many circles miracles are not for today.

In that light, poverty does have it's good side.

i have been told about miracles happening in poor nations that one doesn't often see in the US. a minister i knew once, he and some his congregants would to go parts of Africa, and they'd see miracles now and then.

a lot of the hardcore poverty in other nations is a result of the global economy. its the nature of capitalism on an international scale....there are "winners" and "losers," and it looks like some of the world's most devoted and pious Christians are coming out of nations considered "losers" in the global economy. its worth noting that many of the early christians were slaves, poor people, women...people who did not matter in a culture thoroughly controlled by free, rich, upper class men.

still, i dont think poverty is a good thing. being poor means a life of condemnation. even in america, people who grew up poor and escape all that sometimes find their new social class...not as inviting as one might think. there's actually research that shows that the social class one is --born into-- has a profound effect on many aspects on one's life, even if you end moving up the totem pole a bit.

back to the OP...im glad some people take poverty seriously as a very real, often very dangerous, state of being. its not always a moral failing or anything like that. poverty is clearly a social issue, and it brings with it all sorts of problems. health problems, mental health problems, higher arrest and conviction rates, higher rates of suicide, family problems...

...its hard times, being poor. i look back now, at how the poor kids were treated in school growing up. i didn't 'get it' until recently. now, the lord has let me see, even in my own life, even with people around me...how the world helps create losers, deviants, criminals, etc. i remember some teachers coming down hard on me, when my parents were more working class. i see now...that was nothing compared to what they put some of the poor kids thru, and these are perfectly respectable teachers, ostensibly there to help educate the kids. happens all over...

What "poor" looks like:

reba said:

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They forgot cell phones.

According to the Census Bureau's new annual poverty report, 46.7 million Americans lived in poverty in 2014. This finding is surprising since government spent more than $1 trillion in 2014 on cash, food, housing, medical care, and targeted social services for poor and low income Americans. (That figure does not include Social Security or Medicare.)

More than 100 million people, or one third of the total population, received benefits from at least one anti-poverty program, at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient. If converted into cash, this spending is five times the amount needed to lift everyone's income above poverty.

How can government spend that much money and still have more than 45 million people mired in poverty? The answer is: It can't. The problem lies in the way the government measures poverty. The Census Bureau defines a household as poor if its "income" falls below specific thresholds. (In 2014 the poverty income threshold for a family of four was $24,008.)

But in counting "income," Census excludes nearly all welfare benefits. According to Census, food stamps, housing vouchers and refundable tax credit programs (which provide up to $7,500 per year in cash grants to poor families) are not "income." Of the $1 trillion government spends on anti-poverty programs, Census counts only about 7 percent as "income" for the purposes of measuring poverty.

It should, thus, be no great surprise that government's own data show the poor actually spend $2.30 for every $1.00 of income Census claims they have. In addition, the living standards of the poor (as defined by Census) differ greatly from conventional images. According to the government's own reports, the typical American defined as poor by the Census Bureau has a car, air conditioning and cable or satellite TV. Half of the poor have computers, 43 percent have Internet, and 40 percent have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.

Far from being overcrowded, poor Americans have more living space in their home than the average non-poor person in Western Europe. Some 42 percent of all poor households actually own their own homes; on average, this is a well-maintained, three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 4 percent of poor children were hungry for even a single day in the prior year because the family could not afford food. The average consumption of protein, vitamins and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children, and in most cases is well above recommended norms. By his own report, the average poor person had sufficient funds to meet all essential needs and was able to obtain medical care for his family throughout the year whenever needed.

Of course, poor Americans do not live in the lap of luxury. Many of the poor struggle to make ends meet. But they are generally struggling to pay for cable TV, air conditioning and a car, while putting food on the table.

Johnson launched the War on Poverty in 1964, he sought to decrease welfare dependence and to increase self-sufficiency: the ability of family to support itself above poverty without the need of government handouts. By that measure, the War on Poverty has been dismal failure. While self-sufficiency increased dramatically in the decades before the War on Poverty began, it has been at a standstill for the last 45 years, despite $24 trillion in anti-poverty spending.

We should reform welfare by resurrecting Johnson's original goal: increased self-sufficiency. The keys to improved self-sufficiency are work and marriage. To promote work, able-bodied recipients should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving aid.

Welfare programs should also be reformed to encourage, not penalize, marriage A welfare system reformed on these principles would be good for the poor, the taxpayer and society overall.



ABOUT THE WRITER

Robert Rector is a senior research fellow of domestic policy studies in the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Washington, D.C. 20002; Web site: www.heritage.org. Information about Heritage's funding may be found at http://www.heritage.org/about/reports.cfm.

Please accept my thoughts on the poor in this fashion..
The above reports simply show the government can not fix the poor, not that we should not do something...
What that something might be may be different for the different local areas...
A simple example: Generally speaking poor in Montana do not need Air conditioning .. While those in Arizona do...
Most 'safety nets' are in reality traps... Traps which build unGodly behaviors.
For the church to give her responsibilities to the government ... In my personal view is sinful .

hey reba...

i doubt we agree 100% on things, but I am beginning to appreciate your perspective.

Personally...I dunno. Its like...now, I'm living off disability. Granted, its because I --cannot-- work, but...a lot of that is from stigma and the unprofessionals behavior of people who were supposed to "help" me years ago. ugh.

My situation is live-able and often pleasant, because of Christ. I get disability, health coverage, and my now well-to-do parents take good care of me. I'm blessed beyond measure. Thing is...

...in order to stay on disability, you have to show that you are sick--in my case, mentally ill--to the point that you cannot work. if you make too much progress, you may very well find yourself off disability. if i got a job tomorrow, id be dropped off disability and then if the job fired me...id be done. boom. over.

my point is...in an odd way, american culture is punitive even when its "helping" people. you can stay on disability...as long as you're too "schizophrenic" to work. you can get welfare....just don't get married to a working man. sure, we'll help you avoid going hungry and such...but when you look at the available data, it looks like genuine upward mobility is a thing of the past, at least in america.

and...i dunno what that means in terms of policy, you know? churches can be great, except...well, like with me...when I belonged in a state hospital, I ended up with Pentecostals. they went above and beyond for me, and I --am-- thankful, but...there's a place for gov't services, disability, a safety net, along with what churches can and should do, also.

I am very pleased to read you understood what i was talking about

reba said:

Please accept my thoughts on the poor in this fashion..
The above reports simply show the government can not fix the poor, not that we should not do something...
What that something might be may be different for the different local areas...
A simple example: Generally speaking poor in Montana do not need Air conditioning .. While those in Arizona do...
Most 'safety nets' are in reality traps... Traps which build unGodly behaviors.
For the church to give her responsibilities to the government ... In my personal view is sinful .

Click to expand...

You're right, I agree. It's too late now but there should not be a need for a welfare system. Because there's community. There's family. All we have to do is to look at the OT and how they lived. Everybody got taken care of in the families. Children and a large family was an asset instead of liability. They spread the wealth in old times. This meant everybody was doing good.

There's enough money in the world for everyone on earth to be millionaires, if not trillionaires. But there has to be a community mindset for that and they made sure that people lost that mindset.

Humankind are social creatures. If a baby is left alone in the woods, it will die. It needs help from other humans to survive. It's not us vs them, it's just us. Mankind. This is what we were created for. To be a social give and take community. You need help, take this and bless you. Love your neighbor as yourself, because the spiritual reality is that when you help others, you help yourself. We are one people. One God, one Spirit, one faith, so when we help others it is the hand of the body helping the foot of the same body. It helps us and glorifies God.

...as yourself...means, if I needed to panhandle, I'm hopin the guy would give me a $20 instead of a buck, so I'll give the next needy soul I see a $20 instead of a buck. Personally, I believe that God is making us go through this earthly situation so that we will appreciate heaven more (and give Him more Glory consequently!), than if we were just created there and were always in heaven...we would not have ever known hard times. Are we the first creation of God's, that were not born and raised in heaven? We may be and may appreciate it all more than the Angels do? That may be a bit too far, lol.

I've seen both sides of the poverty coin. Never really rich, but had so much cash flow that I felt rich in it's season. Then one day it was gone and within a short period of time I went from a 4br house in Colorado to sleeping in my truck in Walmarts parking lot for two months...I've never been homeless before that. Oddly enough, I didn't feel a stigma, and I was praising God for having a truck to sleep in. I could look around me at the other folks living in the same walmart and still see that I was rich. A minimal amount of camping equipment and a smart phone & bible on the dash made a huge difference. I could percolate coffee so was well received by other parking lot dwellers, lol. I noticed quite a bit of help being passed around back and forth among all of us. It was almost as if the poor had better hearts than the rich.

It was a little shocking at first, when I first realized, hey I'm on the street...but I managed to put it into an eternal perspective and see that...this was one page in the book of my life. That made me feel...blessed. Like this was just God preparing me for something and needing me to learn perspective, faith and to be content. So we helped the others as much as possible. I haven't forgot them either, we've been back there. All in all it was a huge learning experience.

i dunno. i believe that somewhere in Scripture, we are told to pray for neither poverty nor riches. I see, looking at my own extended family, my own past, etc., how having too much and having too little can both be seriously detrimental to coming to know The Lord and living out a godly, Christ-centered life here on earth.

Jim Parker said:

What "poor" looks like:

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That precious treasure made it to an aid station and without the help of the photographer, Kevin Carter, who took her picture.
The haunting image sticks in my mind and has for years since I first saw it. However, it seeded to root in the photographers psyche to the point it was partially responsible for his suicide years later.Kevin was 33.
Photo journalist ethics prevented him from picking the baby up and carrying her to an aid station. Conscience unfortunately did not prevent the haunting of obeying photo journalist ethics.

Poverty all over the world is predicated on one constant factor as I have seen it in my research. Government. In nations of laws, as some are known for, rather than being a nation of people first, that's how it happens.
The poor become a necessary factor in order for government spending to be funneled to assist the suffering. However, somewhere in that funnel are gaping holes from whence monies leach into bureaucrats pockets. And of course the predators that work the books so as to get paid as well. Think Medicaid and Medicare fraud.
In times like this I start to understand why, "In God We Trust", has become so rearranged in priority of message. It use to denote America was a faith filled nation. Now, it appears that money has become the god of peoples of this nation. They'll do anything for it. Unfortunately, money doesn't buy conscience. It sells out conscience.

In Australia, where I live, various surveys have shown that with charities doing door knocking for raising funds, like for starving people in Africa or even helping folks hit by disasters here in Australia, the wealthy suburbs give less than poorer suburbs. As someone explained to me, wealthy people don't usually get wealthy by giving away their money, their attitude is to hold on to wealth. In my opinion, God does not grant us wealth so we can live pampered lives, we have stewardship responsibilities.

And when we look at the distribution of wealth, it seems like about 85% of the world's wealth is held by 10% of the population. Putting it in other terms, if the world population was 10 people and all the wealth was $100, then 1 person would have $85 and the other 9 would be sharing $15. Plus, the rich are growing richer, the poor are growing poorer. How wealth is being distributed is a problem. Again in my opinion, God never intended those with the gift of building wealth to use it simply to grow more wealth for themselves to the detriment of the broader community. But that, overall, is what seems to be happening.

I used to be a coal miner. Now-a-days, the owners of coal mines (those with the wealth) are bringing in robot driven trucks and machinery and such, which reduces the need to have humans doing the work. Those with the wealth can afford the huge cost of investment needed for the technology and then they get greater profits for themselves. The wealthy end up getting the money which was once spent on wages for average people doing a job. The average person ends up getting poorer because of no job. And it is all legal. Something broken in our system I think.

Please note, not all wealthy people are tight-fisted with their money. Some of them are amazing and gracious givers. Just overall, things do not look so good. Over time the trends seem to be for the top few percent of people to be growing in wealth and those with less happen to be the other ninety percent. And the bottom fifty percent of people own about one percent of the world's wealth so that is a lot of people with comparatively little resources. For an intro to the distribution of wealth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth

Watching Thomas