Baptizing Worms

 

Here is a fact about my life that very few people actually know and until today I had chosen not to share with anybody except my wife and children because I was too embarrassed by it. You see, there was a period of time before I met Karen that I was living in the back of my pickup because I had no place else to go. I was broke because I was underemployed, was attending school to try to better my situation, had bronchitis along with the flu and was in very poor health. One period that I remember vividly was when I had $2.00 to my name and I wasn’t going to get paid for a while. I had no food but knew I would have to survive as best as I could. I bought a small jar of generic peanut butter and a really cheap loaf of bread. Between that and gleaning food off the cafeteria trays left behind by College students too lazy to dump them, I managed to survive for several weeks. I went into the gym early in the morning when the athletes were training where I was able to shave and shower and hand wash my clothes in the bathroom sink with a bar of soap. I would hang the clothes up in the back of my truck during the day to air dry and I had a clothes iron that I could use in the locker room to help remove the wrinkles. I have to say that it was truly the lowest point of my life!

So what caused my situation to change? Well, I finished the program that I was enrolled in but I was still not able to get a job. It was at that point that I made a conscious decision to move someplace else and start over again, even if it required me to take a job that I didn’t want to do. So I started doing production work in a factory. I hated every minute of it! But God honored my efforts and slowly my situation started to improve. For the first few weeks, I lived off bean burritos and cheap soda and I lived in a mobile home in a mobile home park. I was living at a substandard level by most middle class American standards, but my financial situation was improving and my health had gotten so much better. Then life gave me another black eye. The job that I was working came to an abrupt end due to a lack of customer orders and again I was unable to acquire decent employment. I found myself being forced to move again and this time for a much greater distance. This move would change the course of my life forever…I met Karen.

After Karen and I got married, we barely had two nickels to rub together and the first few years were very challenging. Through extremely hard work, sacrifices of time and resources and an attempt to live as Godly lives as we could, God has honored our endeavors by blessing our lives. We truly understand that God did not owe us a good life and that it is God’s grace that has allowed us to have one.

I mention all of this to set the stage for what this post is really about. You see, there are people in our circle of acquaintances who have been questioning Karen and my Christianity because we are not willing to give them money to help them get back on their feet. This is a reoccurring theme with them and they have become accustomed to receiving handouts from Churches, non-profit organizations, the government and individuals. These individuals spend time scouring the Bible to find scripture verses in an attempt to shame us into helping them by implying that by not doing so we are violating the word of God and proving that we are not even as good as secular society.

I’d agree that Christians have a responsibility to aid the destitute, but the world doesn’t wish to support the unproductive and neither do I. These individuals won’t work because it’ll ruin their government hand-out qualification; they live on charity and freebies at other peoples’ expense.  The Bible says in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “ …that if any would not work, neither should he eat”, and there’s no limited interpretation of that. It means that when someone sits idly by, waiting for whatever, with full capacity to meet the immediate need, then it’s really on them. Proverbs 19:15 says “an idle person will suffer hunger.”

Here’s the bottom line. If I can aid those desiring to contribute, then I will teach them to baptize worms so they can learn to help themselves. Unfortunately, some folks just don’t want to learn how to fish…