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Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

May 8, 2013

We're on Food Stamps and We're Not Like That

Everyone’s looking at me.

The thought weighed heavy on my mind as my face flushed red with embarrassment. I slid the card through the electronic reader, entered my PIN and anxiously waited for the transaction to finish.

I’d bought groceries plenty of times before, but this was the first time I’d used government money to pay for them.

A year and a half into our marriage, we moved 800 miles across country so my husband could start graduate school. We had a 5-month-old daughter, and for the first time in my adult life I would not have a paying job.

It was an act of faith, to say the least, to go where we felt God leading. We just didn’t expect it to be as hard as it was.

Read the rest of my guest post for Live58 here.

Filed Under: food, missions Tagged With: food stamps, live58, poverty

Reader Interactions

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  1. When it’s all holy ground | Living Echoes says:
    February 3, 2014 at 7:01 am

    […] can’t pinpoint when it started. Sometime after we had kids. Maybe when we had to get government assistance and every transaction brought imagined judgment. Or maybe it was the loss of those benefits and the […]

    Reply
  2. Why the worst thing can also be the best thing | Living Echoes says:
    September 29, 2014 at 10:08 am

    […] will satisfy your questions. I’ve learned along the way that no matter how much you argue, how much you try to prove to people that you are not like the stereotypes, some people will believe whatever they want and you only accomplish making your own blood […]

    Reply

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Hi. I’m Lisa, and I’m glad you’re here. If we were meeting in real life, I’d offer you something to eat or drink while we sat on the porch letting the conversation wander as it does. That’s a little bit what this space is like. We talk about books and family and travel and food and running, whatever I might encounter in world. I’m looking for the beauty in the midst of it all, even the tough stuff. (You’ll find a lot of that here, too.) Thanks for stopping by. Stay as long as you like.

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