August 17, 2015
Homeless
A man and a woman stood at
the entrance to Wal-Mart with a cardboard sign that read, “Homeless Couple.” I
wondered if I would have felt differently if the sign said, “Shelter less.”
Maybe it’s a matter of semantics, but it seems like someone who is without
shelter is more desperate that someone who labels themselves homeless. Spiritually
speaking, those of us who accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior are never
homeless. “Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we
have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands” (2
Cor 5:1 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----A class at the church Char and I’ve been attending is studying from a book titled “When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor…and Yourself” by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. Char and I decided not to attend that class because we’ve understood this concept well enough, and because another nearby church was offering a more relevant class.
-----A good digest of the book online shows its thesis addresses our likeness to God’s relational nature. The healthy and complete human life is made of relationship with God, self, others, and Creation. All are important to success. This is not to mean just financial success, or some other notion of success. It means thriving amongst a community doing the same, enjoying not only the laboring of their hands, but also the product of that labor, as well as those with whom the labor is performed and those for whom it is performed. If you think into these concepts far enough, you’ll even strike the realization this enjoyment is also gained from honoring and admiring principles of and reasons for industriousness.
-----I mistook psychology for being so much hoo-ha, or a bit more, until I read an absolutely eye opening book by a well seasoned forensic psychologist. I bought this book thinking it would be a good political read concerning what makes the left-wing mindset tick. But I found “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness”, by Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr. to be very much more than a political treatise. He committed one chapter to discussing Dr. Erich Erickson’s psychological theory of the eight stages of human development. As I read it, I recognized those patterns in my life. I recognized them in people I had watched grow up (I am now old enough to have watched two sets of babies grow up - those born when I was twenty and those born when I was forty.) You can see his principles applied in toys made for all age ranges, from toys aimed to develop initiative in babies to toys aimed at developing integrity in seniors. So I grabbed hold of Erich Erickson’s theory and a need to know more about psychology.
-----The keyhole made to receive the key to life is integrity. The aspiration for integrity forms pathways to truth, for the essence of integrity is “proper fit“. Char loves old rusty things in her flower beds. I surprised her one day by putting an old, rusty, Warner T-90 transmission there. It had no integrity left. That’s why I put it in her flower bed rather than amongst some running car’s driveline. It’s parts were all scattered around instead of correctly assembled, bathed in gear lube, shining rustlessly and operating harmoniously with their neighbors. That would have been its integrity.
-----Merely dropping quarters into the hands of the homeless is like pouring ball-bearings into a transmission with a bad main-bearing. Ball-bearings don’t perform unless caged onto their raceways (sorry for the techy-terms, use your imagination.) In fact, if one of those loose, little rollers gets caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, like between a couple gear-teeth, stand back, Mama, there’s going to be a parts explosion! Integrity is important!
-----Somewhere, somehow, either the homeless has lost integrity, the community has lost integrity, or both, while mindless do-gooders are wont to pour quarters into the gear works. I don’t know where the book “When Helping Hurts” is going. I didn’t read it. But my advice is to make sure whatever help you give anyone has the same integrity God made to be the essence of upright and eternal lives. “May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for Thee.” (Ps 25:21) “The integrity of the upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them.” (Prov 11:3)
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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