Job 5:16

So that the indigent have hope,

   The mouth of iniquity is shut.

I spent a few minutes sorting some nearly worthless baseball cards that I plan to get rid of some day. Actually, there were football, basketball, hockey, car racing, and soccer cards in there as well. Those may not be worthless, but they have no value to me personally. I do have one basketball card from my youth that I want to keep, the Iceman: George Gervin and two that I keep with it, Dr. J and Kareem. I do have 37 football player cards and an 88-card team set. The team set has pencil marks that look surprising like my handwriting. So apparently when I started collecting baseball cards in 1978, I had already started collecting football and basketball cards. I quit basketball cards in 1979. I seem to have still collected football cards as late as 1981. But it has been forty years of only baseball since. Forty years of diverging from the Walden principle of only have what you can carry.

Indigent was a word that jumped off the page for me. Its alternatives of “poor”, “wretched”, and “humble” are all adequate, but there is a special sense of needy that comes with indigent for me. Our culture has identified the homeless as a huge “problem” in our country today. My problem with that is that those in power treat the symptoms and not the sources of the “problem”. Christ told us we will always have the poor to care for, but there is a huge gap for me between the poor or homeless due to choice and the indigent who cannot care for themselves.

The alternatives for the basis for the second stitch included “injustice shuts its mouth” and  “the mouth of wrong doing is stopped” with “evil” or “wickedness” or “iniquity” (obviously) sometimes used as the noun. The difference is that the noun takes action or is acted upon, one or the other. I believed that the action is undertaken by God and needs to have that form. I chose “iniquity” as I felt injustice was too “civil”, “evil” was too vague, and “wrong doing” and “wickedness” lacked alignment with indigent.

In 1978, when I was ten and at the height of the breadth of my collecting, I was no less dependent on God than I am today. I did not know it as well as I do now. It was masked by my dependence upon my single mother and my very distant father. I did not have the survival skills necessary to live on my own in the world at ten. The Walden principle of being able to survive and to thrive with just those things you can carry was consistent with what I learned in Scouts, but I also learned the value of not having to. We are all a car ride from death or indigency. Very rarely do we thank God for his blessings with even less with the urgency this condition could support.

I cannot carry forty years of baseball cards with me unless I could use an RV. I do not want to be homeless. I do not want to be indigent. But the only thing between me and those conditions is God. He provided me life and salvation. Everything else is gravy. I need to remember to thank Him for the gravy.