Proverbs 6:11 and poverty will come upon you like a robber and want like an armed man.

I had been doing it tough for several months. Unemployed, looking for something that would help make a way forwards. I had a room in a shared house on a busy street. The government had changed the method of support for housing benefits and I had had no help with my rent for around three months. I was paying my rent from my unemployment benefit, leaving barely enough to survive.

I went to the local grocers and bought their damaged vegetables, living on soup and vegetable fritters (when I could afford the oil). One day I remember I had pasta and processed peas for my dinner. I added some sugar to try and make the taste better. It was horrible really. It was common to have packet soup and add vinegar for flavour.

I spent three days waiting in line at the new offices for housing benefits. At one point the police were called when a young man superglued his hand to the counter. We all had to leave and were told to come back the next day.

I kept going to the offices, week after week. Waiting with my number for hours and sometimes not being called forwards.

One day my number was called and I went and chatted to the lady at the counter (behind her Perspex screen). Restated my situation as she listened. She asked me to wait and went through a door behind her. When she came back and sat down I heard her metallic voice through the speaker tell me that I would get a payment today and that I was owed around four hundred pounds in back rent. I was sent to another part of the building, to wait in another line.

I was nervous as the banks closed at around 3.30 pm and it was already 2 pm.

My name was called just after 3 pm and unceremoniously I was handed an envelope with no eye contact, the person not even looking up.

I walked-ran from the building, crossing busy city centre streets to where I knew the nearest bank was that I could go to.

Ripping open the envelope, here was my chance to maybe get some clothes, a haircut, some nice food, and try and get some interviews for work.

I stared at the cheque in my hands – titled emergency payment, for the princely sum of nine pounds. The disappointment was my immediate companion. But resilience rescued me.

I cashed the cheque, went to the bakers and bought a pie and a proper loaf of bread, then butter and jam on the way home. I ate like a king that night. Tomorrow I would go back again to the benefits offices, but for tonight I had toast for all.

KNOWLEDGE

Entitlement is a robber, taking your time, your resources, and your potential into a gentle whirlpool sump. It causes you to take your ease, to become discontented, to harshly judge others and to live in the land of intentions.

You judge others by their actions while you rest on your intentions. Entitlement whispers into your soul that you are just better than others, that you don’t have to do the hard yards anymore, that you have paid your dues and now should expect the rewards to flow.

Others pass you by, running hard in the outside lane, you smile knowingly, expecting to simply turn up and win.

Losses multiply, loss of status, position, opportunity, and connection. You drift. You rationalise. You complain and change your inner conversation. One day you see it’s all gone, and it’s too late to change. Regret is your companion now.

Let’s not go there in the first place? Deuteronomy 30:19 tells us “I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed may live.”

UNDERSTANDING

Let’s pick one word from this verse to look closer at and see if that can help us gain a deeper insight into how God would love us to live?

The word for “poverty” in Hebrew is pronounced as “reys” and this word appears seven times in the Old Testament, always in Proverbs [6:11, 10:15, 13:18, 24:34, 28:19, 30:8, and 31:7] and always in the ESV translated as “poverty”.  The idea in verse eleven is that poverty would mean you were lacking in goods, honour and a lack of power so that the social status was one of being oppressed.

WISDOM – what little choices can I make today that will have big consequences?

STRENGTHS THOUGHT: Belief, understands its core values and lives from them, huge energy accompanies huge passion in what you are “for”.

Allan’s Unauthorised Version – [and poverty brings you to the vanishing point of scarcity, lack and need as if taken by unreachable men.]

PRAYER: Father, thank you for today. Help me to make wise decisions today in what I do with my time, and who I choose as friends. Thank you.

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