Ten lords a leaping are the Ten Commmandments. But, the first and greatest commandment is to "love the Lord thy God." The second is like unto it: "love thy neighbor as yourself."
A classic tale of neighborly love begins with one of the author's many fantastic opening lines:
Marley was dead: to begin with.
A Christmas Carol tells of a transforming journey taken by Ebenezer Scrooge. The said Jacob Marley described his accessories, the chains that he carried by saying: "I wear the chain I forged in life, I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is it a pattern strange to you?"
Then, as he tries to convince Ebenezer to prevent this fate from becoming Scrooge's own, he declares: "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
As I read this book and thought about the twelve days of Christmas these words ran through my head over and over again: "And there was no poor among them" (Moses 7:18)
The other day a man trying to get money was washing windows. He came up to ours and I said "No" over and over again. Gaia started laughing. My heart was breaking. I have seen a lot of beggars, cripples, children, etc. That day it just weighed upon me. Did I have money in the car? No. The man saw my face and started to wash it. I kept shaking my head and he stopped. I don't know the answer to this experience. It seems impossible to have no poor among us. I guess what the scriptures teach us is that righteousness of one heart and one mind, a place where there is no malice, no greed, and no enmity gives us the power to have no poor.
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