It is one thing to be bad with money when you have it, and quite another to be bad with it when you don’t. My mother gave away what little she had, mostly because she had been taught that every poor person she met was the Lord in disguise, testing her love.
After the grocery-store deli let her go, Mom took a job at Arby’s as an assistant manager. She was a good employee, cheerful and hardworking, and her boss quickly promoted her to shift manager. She’d held similar positions before, always with the same result: She became too involved in the lives of the people she supervised, many of whom were teenagers or young adults or recently divorced single moms struggling to pay bills. My mother would listen to their stories of financial woe and then give them most of her paycheck.
