Fall colors were all around me…today. Thus is the mystery of autumn. You search and search for the brilliance of the fall…and if you oversleep…you miss it. Temperatures are dropping into the low 40’s at night and 50’s to low 60’s during the day. It is much more seasonal weather and the leaves know it. Thanksgiving is less than a month away…and Christmas is a month after that. The Holiday Season has arrived.

Having just attained the full age of 64 I still am amazed when I see that my fellow classmates from Eldorado High School…are all becoming 64 in 2021, also. Somehow the fact escaped me that I was in class with others who were the same age as me…and would be traveling Life’s Road at the same chronological pace as I am. So many simple things can elude us.

Life is a work/luck endeavor. Many will proclaim proudly that the poor simply need to get up off of their backsides and go to work. They go on to enumerate how hard that they have worked for their success. Somewhere in the conversation will be the discussion of bootstraps. Capitalism is devoid of empathy. I heard a person recount a story of a former slave who became free and subsequently successful in business…who then purchased fellow African Americans to be his slaves. Now, this may sound incredible…but the freeman was imitating what he had seen his fellow white business colleagues do in order to be successful in an economy based on the ledger of financial gains and losses. Often consideration is not given to the many hurdles that millions of people have to overcome in order to be a success in America. Years ago our state and federal governments closed most of our mental health facilities. Those programs that remain are working with severely diminished resources. Many of these forgotten humans…now have their home on the streets of our cities and towns.

Luck has played a major role in the success of many in America. It is a bit of a myth that is promulgated by wealthy people that they are blessed by God and favored over those less fortunate. I have many friends who have been Christians for 50 years and still are poor…and happy in their walk with Christ.

We people of faith are a divided lot. Some are driving in fine limousines on life’s roadway…while others are walking on bloody feet…back to Jerusalem. We see the immigrant seeking sanctuary from oppression and abuse and rape and death…and we wonder why they do not want to seek the dream of freedom in their own country… We pass the impoverished and hungry person just outside the door of our favorite restaurant…and speculate where they went wrong…to have missed out on the American Dream that was so easy for us to access…

People who have little…and share it with those who are needier than they are…are those who Jesus is watching.

‘And Jesus sat over against the treasury and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much. And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing. And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury: For all, they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living. Mark 12: 41-44. KJV