May 04, 2011
Choosers
I grew up hearing my family say, ‘beggars can’t be choosers’. For me the phrase has always been a reality and it still rolls off my tongue. Well, at least it did until a friend pointed out, “Only in America can beggars be choosers.” I have to admit, he is right. In America people can make more money begging than if they worked in a fast-food restaurant. Some folks have been known to refuse a job or a hand-up because it might cause them to lose their entitlements. Many of us would like to blame the cycle of State and Federal programs, but clearly Scripture doesn’t agree. “The sluggard’s craving will be the death of him, because his hands refuse to work. All day long he craves for more, but the righteous give without sparing.” (Proverbs 21:25-26 NIV)
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Gail;
-----I agree with your perspective of Prov 21:25-26 in a loose sense. Being a social creature, human nature must deal with a duality between individualism and mutuality. Each one of us is fundamentally individualistic. Maturity involves competency in taking care of one’s own self. God’s curse on man was the eating by the sweat of his brow. It is a simple requirement that the necessities of his own life must be supplied by the movement of his own hands. If these came from the movement of someone else’s hands, the curse would actually have been a blessing, and man would have no individual responsibilities. Thus the curse made man self responsible.
-----And the curse extends beyond necessities of physical life. Man does not live by bread alone. Mental health comes from individual responsibility, an individual is ultimately responsible for his own tendencies, habits, attitudes, and beliefs. We “eat” those even more by the sweat of our brow than we do food, because it is much more difficult to discern truth from falsehood than it is to plant a seed and wait for corn. Then at the pinnacle of individuality is the responsibility of knowing truth or falsehood relative to the I AM. By his mere being a man is uniquely related to God. His ultimate doom or bliss is definitive of that relationship.
-----So mental competency must regard the difficulties and impossibilities of life. A man might be able to fashion his own table, but he can not fashion his own Boeing 737. So he gets paychecks for helping on the 737 and buys the table his neighbor made. The table and 737 are the wealth of a society, everyone’s ability to help is its competency, and the money exchanged between them only marks the efforts of each. This is mutuality covering the neighbor’s lack of competency to build 737’s and the man’s lack of competency in not having time to make his own table.
-----But these are not the only forms of lacking competency. Incapacity is a worse form. It eliminates any efforts for which an individual could have received markers. It has two forms: actual and perceived. Mental competency must regard both carefully. If it fails to supply actual incapacity with markers, mentality becomes incompetent in its mutuality. If it supplies perceived incapacity with markers it destroys the relationship between effort and wealth by blessing perceived incapacity with the sweat of another’s brow and further eroding the mutuality of the thusly blessed one. This particular mental incompetence passes from generation to generation until eventually a society has little mind for effort, little wealth in turn, and many, many meaningless markers.
-----But the righteous man always gives without sparing. To the actually incapacitated, he gives supply. To the perceived incapacitated he gives pressure for mental competence by withholding supply. Thus he increases the mutuality of both the sluggard and the society. The Bible calls for generosity with more than money.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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