All because of God and Others

I have been learning a lot about poverty lately. Not just having tightly budgeted cicumstances, but true poverty. Like poverty that I don't see here in the Midwest. Poor to the point there is no food. Poor to the point there are minimal to no clothes. Poor where there is no welfare system to feed you and hand you money for doing nothing.

I have lived under the paradigm that you are financially poor because of the decisions you made. In my heart and mind I thought that laziness, bad decision making, having more children than you can afford, unwillingness to labor to earn money, etc leads to poverty. Although those decisions usually lead to being poor in parts of the world, they aren't the cause of those in poverty. While becoming poor and then staying poor is generally cause and affect relationship in America, this is not true in underdeveloped and impoverished nations.

Thanks to God, working hard in America yields rewards. Working hard in Ethiopia and many other underdeveloped nations may just mean you carried more water today. Carrying more water than your neighbor yields little - you are more tired, more hungry, but still in the same financial situation than your neighbor. This causes people to lose hope. People living in true poverty, (places with a lack of resources) lose hope because being smarter, harder working, more creative, and more resourceful yields such minimal results that you are no better off than the next person. I want to be involved with people who are stuck in poverty. I want to see God change their circumstances. I want them to have hope. Now that I know their is a difference between poverty and poor decision making I am motivated to make a difference!

I have also been learning about riches. God is richly blessing our business. (at least it feels that way, because I don't have the books balanced to prove it:) I have found my heart being deceitfully proud of the financial situation that Shelli and I are in. We live a comfortable life here in America. Is this really a blessing? It is, but no more than the blessing of living paycheck to paycheck and watching God bring in just the right amount of money to provide for our needs. I was beginning to give our hard work the credit for our financial success. That is not where the credit deserves to lie. It solely belongs to God and all the people he has put in our lives to get us to this point.

This blog entry will be continued...