How I Became Dependent on Welfare

Years ago I came to a startling realization. It happened one Sunday morning as I led the offertory prayer at Zion Mennonite Church, in my half-time position there as the church's first salaried pastor.

As folks were putting their gifts into the offering plate it struck me that a significant percentage of those funds would be disbursed directly to me as their minister. In other words, I was at the receiving end of the church’s charity, a direct recipient of God’s offering money.

That troubled me at first. But, I rationalized, I did earn the other half of our family's income like everyone else in the congregation, by being employed as a half time teacher at Eastern Mennonite High School.

However, as I reviewed our church's budget, I realized that my half-time EMHS income matched almost exactly what our congregation was contributing to the high school through its budget for student tuition and other financial assistance. That made me feel even more like I was just some kind of working welfare recipient.

Then a further epiphany. Maybe at some level we’re all pretty much in the same boat, in that we are all gift receivers more than we are earners or givers. What my fellow church members were giving to the church was also in some way first a gift to them. 

So could it be that all of humanity is on God’s welfare roll, and have been since the beginning of time?

For a start, none of us has ever earned the priceless gift of life itself. And the privilege of being born to parents who loved us and took good care of us (at no charge), and of being born in a land of abundance instead of in some poverty-ridden country, were also things we could have never negotiated, bought or paid for. Besides, many of us received a free public school education, one paid for by others' involuntary gifts--in the form of taxes. 

    
Later some of us got to enroll in institutions of higher learning we could have never been able to create or ever afford to attend without the generous gifts of hundreds of unnamed donors. Add to that the gift of our good health, our relatively sound minds, and whatever talents or gifts we've inherited--all of which helped us get whatever positions we’ve had, and are all examples of amazing, unmerited grace. 

When I was six, my parents were able to buy a farm with the help of a generous uncle who helped us with the financing. Here we grew and produced food for a living, but we could have never done that without the unearned blessings of God’s soil, sunshine and all of the other natural resources that makes a farm productive. In return for whatever we invested in money and labor for the harvests on our farm, we usually got sufficient payment to cover our costs, with some extra in the form of a gift known as profit. In the same way, whenever any of us buys or sells anything, this kind of gift-swapping takes place, grace for grace, blessing for blessing. 

So that’s how I’ve come to believe that all of life is just one big gift exchange, a re-gifting, and that we are all major welfare recipients.

Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s a good thing. We gratefully celebrate our dependence on others, and our interdependence with all creation.

I’ll never forget one of our sons, at around 9 or so, deciding to take his entire piggy bank full of gift money he’d accumulated to give as a Bible School offering one summer for Heifer International. We didn’t realize how much he had gotten caught up in the enthusiasm to help raise as much as possible to send a heifer or some goats, rabbits, or other animals to some needy families abroad.

    
What he was doing wasn’t motivated by guilt. He saw it as an investment, a re-gifting for something he really believed in. He did it because it made him happy.

     
Once we realize how much we’ve been given, it no longer seems like a burden to freely pass on what are, after all, undeserved gifts. 

I once read the story of a medieval landowner who came across a vagabond wandering across his estate. 

 “Get off my property,” he ordered. 

“What right do you have to keep me off this part of God’s good earth?” the man asked. 

“I own the land. It’s as simple as that,” the landowner replied.

“And how did you come to own it?” he asked.

“I inherited it from my father.”

“And how did he get it?”

    
“He inherited it from his father, a general in the king’s army. He fought for it, and was given the estate as a reward.”

    
“Then let’s you and I fight for it,” the man replied, “and whoever wins will own the land.”

    
Point of the story? If you look back far enough and hard enough, you realize that everything is first a gift. We welfare recipients need to acknowledge that amazing grace with humble gratitude.