Today, I was sitting in the Church I'm forced to go to and waiting for the offering to come around. My mother doesn't ever give unless she writes out a check before hand, and when the money is really tight like it's been, that never happened because we simply couldn't afford to do so. I looked over to the jingling sound to my right, and as usual, my dad has his little change holder out. It's just a simple rubber round bit that's hollow and you open it up by squishing it. One of those remnants of the 90's or something. Anyway, it struck me as my dad handed me a quarter to give and rounded up his change, that my dad had never stopped doing this. We barely had anything, and my mother controls the finances normally, and rations a bit of money out to my dad so he can support his smoking habit. And the spare change that my father has from buying his cigarettes every few weeks, he always gives to the church.
I'm not a religious person, but being forced to go to church my whole life, you do pick up on those parables and all those stories about Jesus. I remembered one at that instance, the short one-liner that Jesus told some disciple: that the old woman who gave her single gold coin or whatever was giving far more than the rich people around her who were donating a little bit to the church, because for her that single coin was everything she had, while the rich people barely gave a percent of their income. It reminded me of my dad alot because, frankly we're poor and don't have much money and a single quarter actually does help out when you need to buy some food, but there was my dad, the whole time giving away his money to people other than himself.
I don't know, it just kinda struck me as something I should mention. My dad always does these things without getting any sort of recognition from my mother except maybe a scowl at him 'advertising' our poorness by only being able to give change.
