i will not take food stamps or ride in a store scooter if i can help it

I will not, unless circumstances change and I am unable to stop it, ever take food stamps. Nor will I ride in a scooter in WalMart or anywhere else until I am absolutely incapable of doing otherwise.

My sense of personal pride prevents me from doing so. I know people who ride the scooters simply because they are too large to comfortably walk. I know people who take the food stamps because they are too lazy to get money for food any other way. I know people who have lost their sense of personal pride. For example:

I took Ella to the doctor today for one of her regular check-up things. There was a woman in the waiting room who was on a walker and had an oxygen tank. She was quite large and could barely move. The ladies at the front desk asked her a question to which she brayed out the answer. She moved to the water fountain across the waiting room, realized that she hadn’t told them something and brayed it across the room. She had a shrill whiny voice that carried quite well across the room.

As I looked at her and since I had to hear her, I wondered how it is that a woman can degenerate so far. She had turned into a sad person who felt that everyone didn’t mind if she did whatever she needed to do, talked as loud as she felt she needed to, etc.

The look on her face was sad. It was the look of a person who had given up in life. She was there to get along until she died, and she would probably fight death to the end.

She had a voucher of some kind. I heard of that several times. She had a walker. She had everything she needed except personal pride.

What is it that diminishes a person? Many times it is the simple lack of personal pride.

I am not talking about foolish pride, the kind that makes us think we are, like the sorcerer guy in Acts 8:9, “Someone Great.” I have known a lot of people that had that kind of feeling of overactive empowerment in their lives. It is the kind of pride that is spoken against throughout the Bible. It puts a person in the place of God the Father.

I am talking about the sense of personal pride, a feeling of who you are and what is right for you to do. My wife, Ella, has it. Even though she is in pain, she will go to get whatever she needs herself rather than ask me. I have told her again and again that I will get it, but her sense of personal pride hates the handout, even from someone who loves her.

It was a while before she could bring herself to ride a scooter. She just hated looking like someone who needed help. Now she rides one everywhere we go and I get it, glad, I might add, out of the car for her. Without it, she and I couldn’t go places unless I pushed her in a wheelchair.

The same goes for dressing in such a way that shows pride in self. Young women are dressing less and less, and it doesn’t seem to matter. Young men have managed to attain a fashion sense that is slob. At the mall, people look like they have no sense of personal pride at all. At WalMart, it is even worse.

When we give up that sense of personal pride, we do great damage to ourselves and to our relationship to God. There is no witness in that kind of person. How can you preach a God of power when you show that you are a victim of life and have no power.

I am not talking about people who are forced into these things by circumstances beyond their control. The young mother who has been deserted by her husband and has to find food for her children. Super emergency situations. Things like that. And I have ridden the scooter when I sprained my ankle and could not walk otherwise. But as soon as I get better, I got off.

That sense of personal pride is missing from so many right now in our society. Food stamp usage is on the rise. It is even renamed to make it sound better: Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Plan (SNAP). People looking for a handout is on the rise.

I have received help before when I was absolutely desperate. But I hated it. And will not unless it is absolutely necessary for Ella to have what she needs. And I have always felt that if I took Food Stamps, or SNAP, I would be telling God he was incapable of giving me what I need.

Pride goes before a fall, true. But the lack of a sense of personal pride means you have no regard for yourself.

It was Jesus himself who said that you love your neighbor as yourself. If you do not love yourself, if you have no sense of personal pride, how in the world can you possibly love  your neighbor. With that lack of a sense of personal pride, it is no wonder we all treat each other like dirt.

All this from hearing a woman whining loudly at the doctor’s office.