When you are poor, and live on disability, there doesn’t seem to be anyway out of poverty, so you don’t look further ahead than the next SSI check. If you work, the amount that you receive goes down, so working doesn’t seem to be a good idea.
“With no real job skills, and a very low minimum wage, working is actually a bad idea because it is not possible to work enough to feed and house your family. So you stick with the government checks and you try to do a little here and there to get some extra.”
— From a blog post by my friend and colleague in clergydom Martha Myre, who took a struggling mom and her six children into her home but is now having to raise funds to keep up support for the family.Stories that make you go, “Wow!” in a good way: My friend and colleague the Rev. Martha Myre is raising funds for a struggling mom and the mom’s six kids, all of whom Martha took into her own home.
Back in North Texas, I have a friend and colleague in United Methodist clergydom, Martha Myre, who writes a lot about sexuality issues, especially those involving LGBT issues such as gay marriage and the ordination of gays.
She and I have diametrically opposed views on such issues, on which I’m liberal and she’s definitely not.
But she and I can agree to disagree and remain friends.
And besides, lest any progressives are thinking that Pastor Martha must be some kind of narrow-minded, ultra-conservative fundamentalist because she opposes gay marriage, she makes no secret of being an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter.
Which makes her way, way more librul on most issues than yours truly.
But enough of that.
What I want to share here is Pastor Martha’s story about seeing poverty up-close and personal and doing what she could to alleviate it.
It’s a story about how, after the sudden death of her beloved husband, Martha took a struggling mom and her six kids into her own home to give them the decent shelter and other support they were lacking.
The rest of the story is that Martha, whose own financial situation has changed since she made the family her own family, is now raising funds through the terrific Web site www.GoFundMe.com.
So rather than re-print the story that Martha shared on her blog “Silent No Longer,” I hope you follow the link to her blog and read her story and the story of the struggling family’s she now struggling to keep afloat.
And if you care to donate to the cause, by all means–share some of your means.
You did good work by publicizing the efforts of this woman. These are the types of stories that reaffirm my sometimes shaky faith in the Internet. Without it, there’s almost no way I or so many others would have learned of her story, or that of the family she took in.