Keeping Doors Open for Everyone


by Genevieve Fosa - Date: 2008-09-19 - Word Count: 420 Share This!

The saying goes that when one door closes for us, another door opens somewhere else. However, some of us, many of us in fact, spend our lives knocking at locked doors. We don't need to travel to distant third world countries to find people for whom there are simply no open doors. These are people who long to do good things with their lives, and take care of their families. But for them there is no work, and their children are caught living in government subsidized housing, in neighborhoods where they must fight off drug pushers, hopelessness and worse.

The mother, struggling to give her children a better life is often stuck in a situation where there are no open doors. This is the mother who works two jobs every day to make sure her rent is paid, as one paycheck is not enough to cover both her rent and her utilities. And when she comes home from those twelve to sixteen hour work days, with what little energy she has left, she must meet the needs of her children, without help from family or friends. Should this woman become sick for more than a few days, the result for her and her family is catastrophe, for they will be forced out onto the street. And tell me, what does exist for street people when good people believe that absolutely no one in this country lives on the street who does not want to be there?

Most of the well-to-do and middle-class in this country believe that the only poor people chose to be poor, and like Job's friends from the old story, they tell each other and the person suffering from poverty that it was purely because of mistakes he or she made in her life, that they must live on the street.

People may become poor for many reasons. Companies routinely downsize and plants have been sending their operations overseas. The factories and steel mills that once made this country great no longer exist. Bad health can keep any conscientious person out of a job. When we lose our jobs, and our friends, we need time to heal, and yet we don't give women living alone with their children any time to do that. They have to be back on her feet, at work, every day, no matter what.

We forget that doors that swing open and closed are made by people and that it is up us to keep them open. When we do this, we are acting as God's hands.


Related Tags: philosophy, helping others, class society

Genevieve Fosa is a freelance ghostwriter and editor. She writes both fiction and nonfiction books to your specifications. If you would like to know more about her, please go to www.thebestword.net The Best Word

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