Nobody wants to be a beggar.

They used to come to our door, when I was a child, and my mother always fed them. They must have had a special language among them, for it seemed to us children that every hungry, needy beggar finally found his way to our house. Mother never turned one away. We were very poor ourselves, and when we would protest her constant kindness to them in giving them a free meal, our mother had a standard reply: "Now children, you know the Bible says ‘Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto me’ - and you never know when we might be feeding Jesus." Even we couldn’t knock the idea of feeding "him" so the beggars continued to be fed. Occasionally we’d comment on the fact that mother always boiled and sterilized the utensils which the beggars ate from, an…