The latest Carnival of Family Life is up. In addition to including my post about the thrift store, it contains a post that took my breath away with its simple, determined tone: Consider the ravens.
And while you’re considering the ravens, consider this from the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine: author Sasha Abramsky tells of a Wal-Mart worker — a 58-year-old woman who takes home $195 a week and who considers chunky soup over noodles and butter a “delicacy.” She calls eggs “a luxury kind of thing.”
I do believe that the Lord provides, but I also want to take this woman a box full of meat and eggs and fresh vegetables and fruits every week. I also want to provide her with a union that will work to get her a livable wage. And I want to hug her; desperately, I want to hug her.
In coincidence with reading the “ravens” post and the Abramsky blurb, I just finished Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. The book is an engrossing odyssey of Ehrenreich’s stint as a minimum wage worker, during which she got to know many people like Abramsky’s hard-working lady. Barbara Ehrenreich ended her book with this simple, determined statement:
When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you . . . To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
As Jen says in “Consider the ravens,” I have much to be thankful for. As Abramsky’s heart-breaking Wal-Mart worker says, I’m not starving or anything like that. I sincerely hope the Lord helps them both, and everyone affected by this financial crisis, as He helps and feeds the ravens. But hey, I keep bird feeders filled in both my front and back yards. If I can, and if you can, let’s contribute to a food bank as well. Ravens will eat garbage if they have to; the least we can do is feed them something better than that.
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