Surviving Poverty Is Really Quite Simple...If You Know How

Common Sense Commentary: Is your life a struggle?  It's supposed to be! If it's not a struggle, it will be.

"...Thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked...." Rev.3:17.   

"For all these things do the nations of the world seek after: and your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things."  Luke 12:30.  

"But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you."  Matt.6:33.


Being poor is not so hard if you have already been there and learned how it's done. It's like everything else.  If you have never done a thing it usually looks harder than it is. A new job seems complicated and difficult on your first day.  After you've practiced it a while, it is much easier.  I know how to be poor.  Everybody was poor where I grew up, when I was a boy in a dusty little west Texas town, except a very few people who had already been poor, in the past, and didn't like it.  So they worked real hard and got ahead of everybody else. Of course, their children never learned the art of poverty and their grandchildren were terrible at it.  They couldn't even pretend to be poor ... so they pretended to be richer than they were .  That's this generation. Folks today really work at it and try so hard to look rich that they max-out a dozen or so credit cards and finally get so poor buying cars, baggy britches, dope, beer and movie tickets that they qualify for government aid and can quit their jobs and enjoy their poverty ... on vacation in the Bahamas looking rich where everybody there is poor and knows how it's done.

Back home, we are spoiled and enslaved by all the "stuff" we have accumulated and cherish.  We have brainwashed ourselves that all these possessions, comfort toys and hi-tech junk is essential to our happiness and survival.

The truth is, it takes very little for a person to survive and be content.  For many years, I, and a few friends backpacked the Appalachian Trail, a 2000 mile-long national treasure extending from Georgia to Maine.  Fred Good and I would take a group in the spring and he and I would go again in the winter.  In the wilderness an entirely different set of values give comfort.  A clear, clean spring of water, a fire to look into and see reality not TV, birds singing, getting soaked in the rain, a dry tent to sleep in the rain, fresh pine needles under a good sleeping bag, an easy trail after a long hard climb, a good friend to laugh and share the beauty of nature with, a high-up mountain view of distant, purple mountains, hot coffee on a cold night, a Bible, and the end of the trail... or the beginning of the trail.

If you worry about hard times or loosing all you have accumulated.... forget it. I can be happy living in a trailer and survive on oatmeal, beans, a vegetable garden and a water well.  You can too ... if you have Christ and learn to be poor. Relax, and enjoy what is left of your life on this trail through the wilderness.RB