Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

food

Freaky Friday

Note: I won’t have a Saturday Smiles post this week due to a book review scheduled for tomorrow as part of a blog tour. (Be sure to check it out, though. It’s a good one!) Saturday Smiles will resume next week, as long as I don’t have another day like today.

I should have suspected the kind of day it was going to be when our son came charging into our room in the middle of the night, scared of thunder, and our daughter followed a few hours later having wet her bed. I’m protective of sleep because I seem to have had so little of it since becoming a parent five years ago and especially when entering a weekend of solo parenting. I wanted to start the weekend fresh, ready to take on the world, not already feeling like my regular coffee consumption just wasn’t going to cut it.

Pair the less-than-restful sleep with a mostly cloudy day of intermittent rain and I was ready to curl up with said coffee and a novel and ignore the rest of the world for a little while.

But today my husband had a second interview for a job he’d interviewed for earlier in the week. So, he set out early to make his third drive to Lancaster this week. And because it was raining and we only have one car (I know, this is a “First World Problems” kind of sob story, isn’t it?), we skipped morning storytime, intending to attend afternoon storytime at the library after my husband got back.

The kids and I ate lunch and checked the weather to see if we might have to walk to the library anyway. Then I got a text from my husband that he was headed home with a job offer. Good news! At least, that was my first reaction. And I wondered if maybe we’d skip the library visit so we could talk about the offer and whether or not he was going to take it.

Less than 20 minutes after the text, a couple from church stopped by with an envelope of cash for us. Just to help us out. Overwhelming. We were already planning to eat dinner out tonight so my husband could meet his ride for the weekend retreat, and I wasn’t sure we’d really be able to afford it, or for him to chip in for gas. Problem solved. Praise the Lord. The gift also gave us a little breathing room for buying some food staples.

I’ve been such a whiner lately about whether God knows what we’re facing and whether He hears our prayers and whether He even cares what we’re going through right now. Oh, He cares. I pondered this verse today: “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you.”

My mind was anything but peaceful as I job searched for me while my husband was at his interview. And it became unsettled again when he got home. We spoke briefly before I hauled the kids to the library, and he told me some of the terms of the offer.

I got the kids signed in and settled in. Within minutes, Corban was asleep on my lap, the first sign that the change in routine had us all out of sorts. Minutes after falling asleep, he peed his pants, and consequently my pants, too. So, there I was sitting with a large almost-three-year-old on my soaking wet lap with a 4-and-a-half-year old on the other side of the room quietly listening to stories. And the diaper bag was in the van. So I texted my husband and asked him to come even though he’d been home only a few minutes and had barely had time to eat lunch. He showed up about 15 minutes later and I carted the boy child to the car to change his pants. I left my purse and license inside, so we couldn’t go home for me to change.  I debated whether I should go back in with wet urine spots on my pants or just wait outside in the car with Corban. I chose the Billy Madison method and went back in, pee pants and all.

We managed to make our craft and escape the library without further incident. We made it home, where we talked more about the job and I learned I had about an hour to ask questions and decide if I was on board with this next step. Here are some of the points I had to ponder:

  • This is an entry-level job at Chick-Fil-A, but the owner is willing to pay my husband the highest hourly rate she can pay for that level. So, it’s not a quick financial fix for us by any means, but even with commuting for a little while, he’ll still be making more than double what he makes now. (Which if you do the math is practically nothing.)
  • Holidays are their busiest times, so he can’t take vacation when most people would have vacation, like between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
  • On Tuesday, my husband was not so excited about this possibility. Today, he was all for it.
  • We’re not sure whether we can actually afford to move to Lancaster on what he’ll be making.
  • Just before I texted him to come rescue me at the library, another place called to offer him an interview. Seriously, after months of hearing nothing from anyone, we get two in one day???
  • We’ve been waiting so long on God that now it seems like we’re rushing into something.
  • We only have one car, and when he works days, if we haven’t moved, the kids and I will be without wheels for most of a day.
  • He won’t have to work Sundays or evenings, which was one of our main criteria for a job.

While we were talking all this out and Phil was packing for his weekend getaway, our doorbell rang. Standing on our front porch was another person from church with a box FULL of leftover food from a funeral dinner today. Like tons of food. Soup. Lunch meat. Rolls. Cheese. Stuff that hasn’t been in our fridge for a few months because we’re working with a lean budget. After he left, I lost it and started crying in the kitchen while putting food away.

God is so crazy, unbelievably, faithfully, hysterically good to us. And I am a colossal whiner.

So we decided. Phil will take this job. It is a step in the right direction, even if it feels more like a stepping stone in the midst of a raging river than a bridge across torrential waters carrying us to safety. So, yes, my graduate-degree-holding husband is going to work at Chick-Fil-A. Yes, we are Christians. Yes, we like their food. Yes, we’re glad they’re not open on Sundays. No, we don’t hate gay people.

We had already planned to eat at another Chick-Fil-A tonight because it was a convenient meeting place for Phil’s ride to the Poconos. While waiting for our food there, Phil’s future employer called to confirm. So, I thought that was funny. We ate chicken. The kids played and made friends. We met up with the rest of the guys going to the retreat. I drove the kids home in the rain and the dark.

And because the day couldn’t get any calmer, I noticed when we were just a few feet out of the parking lot that a bug of biblical proportions (you know, about two inches or so) had attached itself to the passenger window, which was down. Because it was icky looking and I didn’t want it flying around in the car, I put the window up, thinking I would trap it or kill it. I think maybe I maimed it. At the next stoplight, I put the window down a crack to see if it would fly away and instead it dropped into the car. Talk about distracted driving! I pulled over in a grocery story lot, having kept one eye on the bug and one eye on the road. I had to shake the floor mat a little to get it to fly away, but we got that problem solved.

The kids and I ended up at the grocery store at 7 o’clock on a Friday night. They were all confused because it was dark. We needed milk, mostly, and a few other things and by this time, my nerves were so fried that I snapped at the bagger when he made what he thought was a funny comment about WIC checks. “Hey, they’re no picnic for us either!” I said. I might have smiled as I said it, but at that point, I was just ready to be home.

After a minor thunderstorm, at least one child is now snuggled all tight in bed and the other one is quiet. Me? I’m headed for that novel, finally, and maybe a cup of chamomile tea.

Tomorrow is another day.

 

The way I see it

I walked out of the grocery store, fighting tears. It wouldn’t have been the first time I left the store crying, nor would it have been the last.

It was food stamp day, a day I was blissfully ignorant of four years ago. Grocery stores, especially the discount one in our area, are unusually busy the day food stamp recipients receive their monthly benefits. I know this now because until a month ago, we were food stamp recipients. We also qualify for supplemental nutrition through the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program.

I’ll pause here in case you want to get off the train before we really start rolling. See, last time I wrote about being on food stamps (the government calls it SNAP; I’ll use that term later), I lost at least one Facebook friend (who maybe wasn’t really a friend at all?) and was served a heaping dish of criticism for the choices our family has made.

So, here’s your chance to leave this conversation before it ever starts. If the thought of people on food stamps makes your blood pressure double, if “welfare” is a four-letter word to you, well, maybe this post isn’t for you.

Or maybe it is.

Back to the grocery store. I was picking up a few things we needed. I might have even used a WIC check for milk, juice and bread. I think I bought bananas. In the last month, we’ve had to tighten our budget greatly. My husband is looking for full-time work. We have credit card debt we’re desperately trying to get rid of. God is providing enough work to pay our bills. And we are not lacking for anything, not even food.

We are blessed.

I noticed the full grocery carts. The young families. The multi-generational families. And, yes, I made assumptions about who was on food stamps. I stole a couple of glances into carts — because isn’t that what we do? — and wanted to judge their purchases, even though I have felt the weight of judgment like a 50-lb bag of sugar on the bottom of my shopping cart. I couldn’t do it, though. I couldn’t judge. And I don’t say that to make you think I’m above judging others because I’m not. I jump to conclusions faster than a startled grasshopper.

I couldn’t judge because I could see. For just a moment I saw struggling families trying to make ends meet. People making decisions the best they know how. Moms pushing heaping carts of the entire month’s groceries for the love of their kids.

And I heard. I heard in my head the hurtful words I’ve seen posted on Facebook: how people on welfare are lazy or want to make a career out of it. Words I’ve heard Christian brothers and sisters say: that we make it easy for single moms because we give them food stamps, that a mother who lets her child outside without a coat in winter must be a food stamp (and bad?) mother. Words left unspoken but are implied.

Hear me now: There is nothing easy about being poor. Or being on food stamps. Or being on WIC. Yes, the government programs ease one burden. But they don’t lift it completely. Our family could buy food, but we still had to pay the heating oil company to heat our house in winter. We were “privileged” enough to go into debt to do it. Others don’t have the luxury of making such choices. We still had to buy diapers for our kids. And toiletries, lest we be judged for the smell and dirt around us.

The worst part, though, is the shame. Few people in our church know we were on food stamps because I didn’t want to them to know. I didn’t want their pity or their judgment. So, I stewed silently when I heard hurtful things. I avoided people we know in the grocery store because I didn’t want them to see me using WIC checks. I only talked about it with the friends I knew would understand.

I endured questions from well-meaning grocery store employees who asked my kids, “Do you have a daddy?” and clerks who repeatedly told me the date to write on my WIC checks because I’m obviously stupid (my words, not theirs).

I never wanted to walk this road, but it’s the road we chose. We didn’t go into it thinking about how much we could take or how we could be a burden on the government. We did it for our kids. The best thing for our family while my husband was in seminary was for me to stay home, for him to go to school and work part time, and for us to receive government assistance. Even now, I feel the need to defend our decision. Because yes, I could have worked. The kids could have gone to day care. We could have done what so many families do and do whatever it takes.

Honestly, I’m not sure we’d have made it through intact. As it is, we barely made it out of seminary alive and whole.

Here are some things for all of us to think about:

  • According to the government Web site, SNAP is “the nation’s first line of defense against hunger.” The site also states that nearly half of the participants are children and more than 40 percent of recipients live in households where there is some income. Therefore, not all people on food stamps are unemployed. They might be underemployed. They might be graduate students in medical school, future college professors earning a Ph.D. Or they might be a scared single mom who made a mistake and now has a baby to take care of. It doesn’t really matter to me why someone is on food stamps, only that they are. And they might need help in other ways. 
  • Yes, we have all encountered or heard stories of people paying for food with food stamps while paying with cash for cigarettes or alcohol, or having an iPhone or a nice car. (Fact: You can lease a car of any kind and it doesn’t count toward your “income” or “assets” when applying for food stamps. If you, however, own a van that is worth more than $5,000, you could be ineligible to receive food stamps because you have too much money in “assets.”) This article gives some perspective. Not everyone grew up in a house where they learned to make good decisions about finances. Some people are trapped in a cycle of poverty not of their own making.
  • The church — and some who are politically conservative —  is sending mixed messages about the poor. We won’t provide birth control for women, but if they happen to get pregnant, even out of wedlock, we will implore them to have the baby and not abort it. And if they decide to keep the baby and make a go of it as a single mom, we don’t want them to live on welfare. Here’s my frustration: If the church won’t help poor people, why shouldn’t the government do it?
  • And, finally, who among us is truly deserving? People say that others don’t deserve to have children, don’t deserve to have government help, don’t deserve to live. Yet somehow we forget that we didn’t do anything to deserve being born in America. And if we are Caucasian, we didn’t deserve to have the government give our ancestors a plot of land on the frontier to build a farm and a family on. Even if we have earned every penny we’ve ever made, it is still a gift from God. Children who eat dirt cakes in Haiti are no less worthy of life than a fortune 500 CEO. People have told our family that we are the exception and that the food stamp program was created for people like us, as if that somehow makes it okay to tell someone else their child deserves to starve. That breaks my heart.

You know that famous Proverbs 31 woman? Well, right before the description of her is this charge:

Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves,
for the rights of all who are destitute.
Speak up and judge fairly;
defend the rights of the poor and needy.

The poor often have no voice. And maybe that’s because we never ask them to speak. We let our assumptions and their behavior speak for them.

I have become passionately defensive of the poor these last few years, and I hate to even try to identify with the poor because my poverty is nothing compared to those who have lived with it generation after generation — whether in this country or another. Please do not mistake my tone for angry or judgmental. And if you defriend me on Facebook because of this, I’ll live.

My point was just to give you another lens to look through.