If it's Thursday...

So much for trying to write every day.  I'll just have to keep trying.
I'm still trying to decide what labels to place on each day as a guide for readers about topics. 
Unfortunately, unless I use foreign names for days, I'm not going to find an alliterative meme such as Flashback Fridays or Take a Stitch Tuesday. 
Here goes a thought for one day.
Poverty.  We've heard much about poverty lately.  It seems to be couched in financial terms, although many people may be cash poor but not consider themselves poor.
Here are some of my thoughts on poverty from a financial setting.

Poverty is being unable to replace a valuable item if it wears out or is broken.  If you can run out and charge a broken or lost  item such as a refrigerator or even a computer, you are probably not really poor.  If you can replace something even when you still have perfectly good resources, you are relatively well off.

Poverty is probably not having shoes or badly repaired shoes. 

Poverty is being unable to replace a service such as water or lights if it is turned off or never seeing such a service in your area.

Poverty is hearing your children cry themselves to sleep at night because you don't have money for enough food for that day, week, month, year to adequately nourish them.

Poverty is never seeing a doctor in your area--ever.  As a result you have parasites and other diseases which you may consider normal but could be treated if a doctor or healthcare professional were nearby.

Poverty is having to walk miles to carry potable water for daily use.


Like most Americans I have never had to deal with any of these, although I grew up constantly hearing my parents say "we don't have money for that."  We always ate well, had shoes, a roof over our heads, and good transportation. We children took any delays in repairs or goals as just that--delays.  Sometimes they were disappointing, but we never truly considered them unreachable.

Proverbs 30:8 describes our lives which echoes the sentence in the Lord's Prayer:  "Give us this day our daily bread."

The worst kinds of poverty are not monetary but in other areas such as spirit or imagination or character.  More on those later.