I am thinking right now of food scarcity and hunger. Not in Somalia, not in North Korea, and not in Haiti, but here in our own beloved Canada. It is a growing phenomenon. I don't recall the stats and don't have them readily available but it is getting worse. We are still one of the world's wealthiest countries with the highest GPD and the highest median income. And we have a growing problem with hunger. You wouldn't guess it to look at the local supermarkets and stores with shelves overflowing with abundance and selection such as earlier generations could only have dreamed of. We also have more than ever poor and homeless begging in front of the stores while they're open and sleeping in the doorways when they are closed. This post is not about the various causes of homelessness and poverty, though suffice to say that the inequality between haves and have-nots is growing alarmingly in this country.
I have always been poor, at least since my parents' divorced each other when I was fifteen. Let's just say that for me shit went on happening for many years and I stayed poor. To my surprise, I never once went hungry. Luck perhaps? I certainly can't figure it out. I know that I was fortunate to have friends who were vegetarian when I was in my teens and I learned a lot from them about budgeting and doing well with little. When I moved out on my own at eighteen I became vegetarian and joined a food co-op where for the exchange of four hours of volunteer work every month I ate well on discounted healthy food while subsisting on an incredibly tight budget. I was very resourceful and developed a very good nose for bargains and deals which also introduced me to some amazing foods from all over the world. I would often have to travel across the city to get the bargain I needed for the right kind of cheese or the perfect deal for fruit and vegetables or natural peanut butter. I prepared everything from scratch and became a very able and creative cook.
While surviving on welfare for three and a half years I still did well. I still don't understand how I did it. I was fortunate in that I had only myself to look after. I don't know who I would have managed if I had a kid to feed. Not having a cigarette habit neither a taste for alcohol probably helped.
I think God must have been looking after me or something. How else could I have made it through this labyrinth of poverty and coping with a system that hates the poor and wants only to crush us underneath its heel? I have never once had to visit a food bank. I actually was able still to donate to the food bank, which I still do to this day. I never once had to beg on the street. Yet even at my very poorest I have given money to beggars. Please don't ask me to explain how. I absolutely have no idea, only that I was being taken care of.
So then, if God was taking care of me, then why doesn't he look after everyone else? A very hard question. I think that he really desires to take care of all of us but somehow this is contingent on our trusting him to do this. Faith, or more accurately, trust, is the key that opens the storehouses of heaven. But I can't say that I really knew at the time that I was trusting God. But I also think that when God is providing for us it is also with the proviso that we share the blessing with others, as channels of his goodness. This isn't to say that everyone who trusts him or claims to have faith gets off as well as I did. This is a question for which I do not have any answers. It puzzles and troubles me as much as the rest of you.
Even now, on my income (twelve bucks an hour for twenty-five to thirty hours of work a week) I am able, thanks to the blessing of BC Housing where I pay less than thirty per cent of my income for rent, to travel every year for a month or longer to Mexico, Costa Rica or similar in Latin America. I am able to save money. It doesn't seem fair or just, especially to moderate income earners who make more than twice what I earn in a year yet have to settle now for stay-cations because they can't afford even a trip to Vancouver Island (nothing unusual as the ferry costs soar). On the other hand, I don't have a car, no expensive habits or tastes, eat almost all my meals at home, and buy my clothing second hand. But it still doesn't seem to add up. And while God has kept me well fed all my life he did not give me decent parents who knew how to raise a kid with special needs, didn't save their marriage and didn't protect me from becoming homeless. I can say that despite all odds that he has protected and care for me throughout all these and other misfortunes.
But how do we address and solve food scarcity when there is such an abundance of food but without equality of access? I really get weary of the usual litany of excuses that come from our government officials mouths, rather like really nasty bad breath, that they don't have the money, they don't want to raise taxes, yadda yadda yadda... It is this same government that magically "found" a half billion dollars to fix the roof of a sports stadium and shelled out ten billion to host the Winter Olympics. Oh but they love sports stadiums and Olympics and really care not a rats derriere for the poor. If they cared enough they would find the money. For those of you who care enough, yell it out and make your voices heard!
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