Lent
March 21, 2022
Scripture Reading: Joshua 5:9-12
The Lord said to Joshua, ‘Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.’ And so that place is called Gilgal to this day.
While the Israelites were encamped in Gilgal they kept the passover in the evening on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho. On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.
I worked in the public welfare arena for 35 years and took a lot of negative blowbacks from friends and relatives, even some strangers, who classified the poor as lazy, no-good, people. I had an aunt who attacked me at every family reunion about all the welfare queens she knew. My observation over those years was that people receiving public assistance were essentially no different than the general population. It may come as a surprise but there are lazy, no-good people at every income level. I have been a waitress and a nurse’s aide (now called a nursing assistant, I think) and can assure you that neither job is for the weak or the lazy. The minimum wage in Oklahoma for waitpersons is $2.12 an hour they are expected to make up the difference between that and the minimum wage of $7.50 an hour with tips. According to the MIT living wage calculator, a living wage for a single person in Oklahoma is $13.53 an hour. What we strive for in the human services realm is helping people become self-sufficient.
Sufficient means to meet one’s obligations or satisfy one’s needs: competency also: a modest but not parsimonious scale or way of living: adequate comfort*.
I thought of this as I read the scripture above regarding the Israelite need for manna after their escape from Egypt. Eventually, they learned to be self-sufficient in planting and growing crops. I hated the change in the law in the mid-1990s when the federal government changed the work requirement for receiving public assistance to taking the first job offered. Most of those jobs were minimum wages. With an 18-month vocational education course, an individual could move from being a nursing assistant to becoming a practical nurse that would pay enough to make them self-sufficient. Nursing assistants to survive would need food stamps, Medicaid, and if they had children childcare supplements, and they would still face the judgmental biases of their neighbors who are called to love them.
Prayer: Lord, you provided manna when it was needed and people to guide your children into self-sufficiency. Help us never forget our role in helping others to reach that standard. Amen.
*https://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/unabridged/sufficiency
All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights are reserved.