At the bank

In Texas, like many other states have also started to do, when you have filed for unemployment, your “check” comes in the form of a debit card. It has a bank logo and the Texas flag on it, so when you use your unemployment card you look like a proud Texan who banks at Chase to the rest of the employed world.
 

As someone who banks at Chase, today I decided to ask my teller if, instead of having to deal with both cards, I could just link the unemployment card to my regular account.

 

“Is there anything else I can help you with?” she asked after I deposited a check into my regular account.

 

“Ummmm….yes, actually, I have a question,” I said.

 

“OK?”

 

“I have this card … from the Texas Workforce Commission,” I say as quickly and as quietly as I can. “Is there any way I can link it to my account?”

 

Going through my head are the following thoughts:

“I’m on unemployment, but really I’m not like THEM, you know….THEM…those people who milk the government. That’s not me. I’m about to be a missionary for a year. Man, I wish I could tell her I’m not like THEM. I could tell her and it’d be like sharing about The Race, right? I’d kill two birds with one stone–share about this trip and let her know I am not one of THEM at the same time.”

 

We know who THEY are. I’ve heard people complain about THEM so many times: the people who hold up the grocery store line while the checker deals with the food stamps. Or the person who has been on unemployment for a really long time. I’m not saying I agree with milking the system, but I realized as I walked out of the bank that all of those times that I judge, I have no right.

 

Why? Because not only do I not know people’s situations just like that teller didn’t know mine, but I am, in fact, one of THEM.

 

I am a nobody without God. Just because I have a degree, or because I made a certain amount of money at one time, does that make me better than anybody else. 

 

I am no better than anyone else here in my country, and I am certainly no better than anyone else I will be trying to serve overseas because I just happened to be born in a country that has allowed me many luxuries, including that Texas flag unemployment card.

 

God, PLEASE help me to “do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than (my)self. (And to) look not only to my own interests, but also to the interests of others.” I pray that “(my) attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross!”

Phillipians 2:3-8