Feed My Sheep! Blog Action Day

I was poor as a child..considered below poverty level but as a kid..you really don't understand..all I knew I was rich with love...a love so strong a mother sacrificed her children to allow them a better life...I remember...I don't forget...and sometimes I cry.

I think about what could have happened...appreciation for the egg sandwich we ate for dinner just about every night...or the bread milk and sugar..our breakfast bowls consist of...as a child..I ate it... as an adult... I never understood how I could...thank goodness I wasn't spoiled...I appreciated it...the soggy wet sugar bread..and to think I really believed it was poverty for a good part of my life!

The highlight of the week came when the Salvation Army came by...relief...generosity..and good food. A full course meal..to me fit for a queen. I was lucky but some would still view as poverty...I thought so too until I really understood what poverty meant!

I raised 3 boys alone, it was not easy starting a new career and with three growing boys in the house..my life changed..and new worries came in...how do you feed these boys and keep the lights on?..sometimes I made choices...choices not easy for anyone...the type of choices..that makes you cry and sometimes feel so much shame... sometime I would sit up at night and think just how the hell did this happen to me?..sometimes the lights went out.but somehow we managed and things that we needed always seem to come to us.... I did everything I could to keep my boys growing strong...I'm not ashamed..this is who I am and where I came from and to think I really believed we were poverty stricken....

"We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty." Mother Teresa

One thing was certain...I was loved and so were my boys and we go back and talk about those days. While it was a very stressful and scary time in my life...my boys remember it different.

Today is blog action day, to me it's not just blogging about poverty...do something to help...to make a difference...it starts in your backyard...throughout your state...travels around the globe..your action today..may cause someone feeling appreciation for the first time in their life, someone to eat a hot meal....or even have running water.

"I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do." - Helen Keller