I'm going to post this story again because it is valuable:
Quote:
I was just talking with a coworker yesterday about poverty. She started out on welfare and was raising three children on her own. She didn't have enough money or time to get educated and had to make do with a low paying job and little funding from the government. She and those like her who have little education often make poor life decisions because they don't know what is available to them. It becomes oppressive and breeds hopelessness. So many people in poverty are either depressed or angry. The angry ones sometimes resort to criminal activity to take what they need. The depressed ones fall further and further away from any chance of a better life as they settle into what they believe is all the only life they can achieve.
The coworker I was talking with is one of the few from the circle of people she grew up with who now has a decent job and good benefits for her family. She told me that she came to a realization that everything is a choice and she was making bad ones. How did she know this? Because she enrolled in the Welfare-to-Work program when it was still going strong. Through that program she began to realize how she could mold herself into the person she wanted to be, despite the hand that life had dealt her.
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This woman
still has not been able to go to college. She desperately wants to but she cannot qualify for loans because of her bad credit and other sources of funding are in short supply.
FYI, JWithers, the man who coined the phrase "God helps those who help themselves" did not believe in God's constant involvement in our lives. The Bible tells a very different story - one of humility, compassion and sacrifice even for the most wretched and undeserving of us.