When I’m sleeping out in the streets and it seems like it couldn’t get any colder outside, I think to myself how in the world did I end up here? This isn’t a dream that I am sleeping on concrete, the dream is that I can be used by God to empower those who are sleeping on the streets and don’t have a warm bed and a house to go back to.
I don’t know why God chose me to do this. How could a middle class white kid from small town Pennsylvania end up helping in the streets of Harrisburg thinking he could make a difference. The truth is that I cannot make a difference at all, I can tell these people what they want to hear, I can give them what they want to have, but ultimately it is God who provides what they really need and He is the one who can renew minds and transform lives. I believe that God has answered my prayers when I asked if I could be used by Him. I never expected this is how he would do it but the Lord has given me a heart and a passion to help these people. I’ve come to learn a lot about my Christianity from my interactions and I hope that I can help others through my service.
I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have eight children with six different mothers having to pay child support for each one. The options available are to work forty hours a week and receive a ten dollar pay check because I had so much child support to pay or I could be unemployed, live of the food provided by shelters and soup kitchens, and make my own cash dealing drugs. This is a real story told to me by a homeless friend. It’s easy to sit back and think to ourselves in the warmth of our homes that this person should work and pay child support, but he still can’t support himself with that. This is a situation the friend of mine likes to describe as a humpty dumpty scenario. We all know what happened to humpty dumpty and how all the kings’ horses and all the kings men couldn’t put him back together again. This person’s life is an example of that. The decisions he made led to a shattered life that all the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men can’t put humpty dumpty back together again. It seems like a lose, lose situation. How can his life be put back together after the mistakes were made? He has probably already changed his ways but there is nothing he can do to fix his situation.
Morality becomes more blurred when you lose your job and are forced to live on the streets for a couple of months. It seems right to the average person to go to a temp agency to find work but it really doesn’t help a person. You need to work for at least three months to secure yourself. After three months of working you can collect unemployment if you get laid off which is very likely to occur in the current job market. Working from a different job day to day doesn’t make enough money to get you off the streets and wastes your time when you could be applying for a long term job. And when those long term jobs aren’t available, what do you do? Of course you would tell them to work, but it just isn’t that simple.
Another thing to consider is this; someone grows up living on the streets and using drugs from the age of 13 or 14 ends up wasting 20 or 30 years of their life until they realize at mid-life that they can’t keep living like this. They enter a rehab program that gets them off their addiction, moves them into their own apartment and gets them a job. They work for a little bit but realize they don’t have any friends living this kind of life, they don’t know how to live like this, this life is uncomfortable to them. What should they do? Everyone wants to go back to what is comfortable and what is known to them. That’s why everyone doesn’t live in a tourist location, it’s nice to get away but we all have a desire to go back home at some point. And for some people, home is on the streets.
I met a guy who was in the marines for four years, got a degree in architectural engineering, worked for a company getting almost a thousand dollars a week right out of college and is now living on the street because of layoffs. He had enough money saved up to pay rent for about a month or two but had to live on the streets for a couple weeks before he could start collecting unemployment and get an apartment. It’s easy to say he should just find another job but it’s not that easy to find one. He is working hard to find one, but a lot of people don’t like hiring people off the streets. So he has to wait for a couple more weeks for unemployment to get an apartment to get a job. And the weeks that he is on the streets is filled with humiliation and to a certain degree, dehumanization, where he is rejected by society because of his status on the street.
Maybe I ended up questioning what I am doing trying to help the homeless in order to break down the stereotypes I had about them from before. Maybe it’s so God can use me in ways I could never imagine. Just take a leap of faith, stop judging, and start serving. It doesn’t take sleeping on the streets to help and understand though, it just takes saying hello. It’s as easy as not ignoring them and looking them in the eye and saying hi.
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