COMPASSION
Guiding By Grace By Elizabeth James
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ob Lawson grew up in Whitley County, outside of Corbin, Ky., surrounded by poverty everywhere he looked. He remembers each detail all too vividly: “I went to school each day with kids who lived in substandard housing, and I saw many of them wearing shoes that were so small their toes poked out of the front.” Rob saw children his age and younger go all winter long without a coat to keep warm, and many of those children even missed meals. “I remember a kid I went to school with — we were friends — when I went over to his house you could look through many parts of the wood floors and see dirt. The actual ground was peeking out in some places.” These memories always made an impact on Rob growing up, but he didn’t quite realize it at such a young age. Rob explains that his family was by no means wealthy, but growing up in a double-wide trailer made him “the rich kid” to many of his peers. When Rob was in sixth grade, he and a friend were playing hangman one day. “The word he was trying to get me to guess was a four-letter word,” Rob says, “and his hint was that it was a word that described me,
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and not him: ‘Rich.’ I remember looking at it, and it had never occurred to me that anyone would ever even consider me well off.” Rob shares that, while his family didn’t have a lot, they did have so much more than everyone else. Today, Rob is a financial advisor at Thrivent Financial and a board member at Christian Appalachian Project (CAP). Thrivent is a financial services organization that provides guidance for those who want to learn how to be wiser with money and also live generously. His admiration and love for the people of Appalachia has inspired him to give back by providing financial direction for some of them as well as volunteering with CAP in addition to serving on the board of directors. “The people of Appalachia are very loyal to one another. And there is a lot of pride, not from a place of arrogance, but a pride in where you’re from.” Rob has spent a significant amount of time traveling around the country and has met a lot of people from different regions, but he says he hasn’t met another group of people with as much pride in the land they inhabit as the people of Appalachia. It’s something that
THE MOUNTAIN SPIRIT | 50th Anniversary Commemorative Issue Volume 2
