Love Wins Always
(photo credit by glowbird)
I met Hugh Hollowell in Raleigh, N.C. on a cold Sunday morning in late February. I’d heard about Hugh and his ministry through a mutual friend. I sent him an email and asked if I could come over, see what he was doing and write about the ministry –Love Wins — for my upcoming book.
I wasn’t at all sure what to expect. I didn’t know Hugh, didn’t know much about him, and knew even less about the homeless. During all of my years of reporting, I’d never had much exposure to the homeless. Oh, sure, from time to time, I’d head over to the Salvation Army to do the holiday story. Once I tried to interview the black woman who roamed around town wearing a heavy wool coat on the hottest of July days, pushing her shopping cart filled with all her wordly belongings, but she was far too paranoid to talk to any reporter.
I thought of homeless people as “those” people. I assumed they were mentally ill, alcoholics, druggies, or just lazy. I thought of myself better than “them.” I felt pity for them, sorry that they just didn’t have the backbone to get their lives together.
But then that was before I met Hugh and his friends in Raleigh, and before I had a couple of family members who were one foot shy of becoming homeless themselves.
I don’t think of the homeless in terms of “me” and “them” anymore. I think of the homeless as someone who could very well be my son or be my mother. In Raleigh I met people who were someone’s son, someone’s mother, somebody’s sister and another woman’s daughter.
Hugh Hollowell helped me to see past my own ignorant biases and uninformed misconceptions. If you want to learn more about how people become homeless, read this post by Hugh.
You’ll read more about Hugh and the ministry of Love Wins in my forthcoming book but meanwhile, I asked Hugh if he would write up the story of the miracle he witnessed this Christmas. He was gracious enough to do so.
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You matter to Someone
Marti is a stay at home mom – her husband Troy works in IT. They came to the Triangle from Northern New Jersey early this summer, lured away from family and friends by the promise of a new job for Troy. The new job was great – up until Troy was told the company was failing. By Halloween he is unemployed.
They have some savings and he gets occasional part-time temp work. Marti home-schools their two kids while Troy looks for work. After school is done one day, she goes online and finds something I wrote. Intrigued, she writes me.
She wants to help.
* * *
Steve and Karen are from Northern New Jersey. After a family tragedy, they decide to start over somewhere else. She has a sister in the Triangle, and starting over is always nicer near family.
Steve works construction and Karen has always had service related jobs, like working in a kitchen. Steve has never had a problem getting work, so they set off for North Carolina, with no plan more specific than to find work and start over.
The sister is delighted to put them up, but the house is very crowded – six people in a one bedroom apartment. After several weeks of looking for work and finding nothing, Steve and Karen move out and come to Raleigh. In New Jersey there are lots of shelters for people like them – here, not so much. Couples don’t get put in the same shelter here – they are treated as individuals. There aren’t enough beds, so you have to pick a number; pick the right number and you get a bed. Losers are turned away.
* * *
For several months now, Marti has volunteered with us. On Saturday mornings the kids get left with Troy and she comes downtown to share coffee and biscuits with her new friends, all of whom live outside or in homeless shelters. She buys into our crazy idea of developing friendships with folks who have much less than we do for no other reason than to love them, to treat them like they matter – because they do.
She is a natural at this – she is deeply empathetic and loves to listen. She quickly discovers being homeless means no one wants to listen to your story. But Marti will. She will sit next to you, sipping coffee, letting you ramble and ramble, asking intelligent questions so you know she is listening. A natural.
For several weeks, she listens to Karen. They’re from the same neck of the woods, so they have that in common. They both like to cook, they both like being homemakers. Karen tells her how bad it has gotten and how it hasn’t always been this way – how once things had been much better. And Marti listens. She always listens.
One Saturday Karen doesn’t show up for coffee. Marti wonders if maybe Karen and Steve have found a place to live. And they have – sort of.
* * *
October is a rough month for Steve and Karen. First, Karen is sexually assaulted in the bus station. Then the weather turns cold – increased demand means often their numbers don’t get drawn to sleep inside. Or his will and her’s won’t and he just can’t imagine sleeping indoors while she sleeps on a sidewalk somewhere. So they move into a tent in the woods by the interstate to be next to each other. Because being homeless is bad, but being homeless and by yourself is horrible. And then it gets colder.
I take them blankets and sleeping bags. I get them bus passes so he can keep job hunting and a cell phone so they can stay in touch with the sister and have a number to put on job applications. And I sit and drink coffee and listen. Because that is what I do. Every single day.
* * *
Christmas week, Marti shoots me an email, asking if I had heard from Karen. I bring her up to date.
Marti writes me back an hour later -
Hugh,
Troy and I want to invite Karen and Steve to live with us – for a while, anyway. I know I don’t know them that well, but I do know I can’t say I follow Jesus if I live in a house with an extra bed and I know people sleeping outside in 25 degree weather. Can you help us put this together?
Yes, I can.
The morning of Christmas Eve, Troy and Marti and Steve and Karen and myself are eating donuts, drinking coffee and listening to each other. Troy and Marti ask a lot of questions – and so do Steve and Karen. We talk for four hours – setting up rules, expectations, hopes and fears. Both couples agree to give it a trial run – a week together, to see how the whole compatibility thing works out.
And so, on Christmas day, Steve and Karen eat Christmas dinner with Troy, Marti and their two kids, while dogs run underfoot. And that night they sleep under thick quilts, with a bathroom down the hall. Karen sleeps her first night through in months.
It isn’t perfect. Steve and Troy are both still unemployed. Steve and Karen need to find work and housing for things to improve long term. Marti and Troy know this will increase their food budget, at a time when they ought to be cutting back.
But two people that 48 hours earlier were shivering in the cold with no hope now have people who care about them, a warm bed and are making plans for the future. Karen and Steve call it a miracle. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But if it isn’t, it will do until one comes along.
Interesting. I am pondering some thoughts and I am also glad Karen and Steve have a warm bed and I pray they find work or whatever God has planned for them.
I am pondering as I think about Jeanette’s mum in The Glass Castle and how she wanted to live that way – and the paranoid lady you tried to speak to.
Do we as the church only try to help and house those who want to be helped and housed? I am thinking, as I have no idea and no experience in this area at all.
[...] Some folks ask what my day-to-day life looks like. I always tell them there is no typical day. However, here is what I was working on Christmas Eve. [...]
This story illustrates the difference in thought and action that we often unknowingly reflect in our speech. So long as people remain unknown to us, they can be placed under the umbrella label of “the homeless”. When Marti got to know Karen, Karen first ceased being one of “the homeless” and became a person who was homeless, or a person experiencing homelessness. Finally, she just became Karen, a person rather than a label or an adjective. Marti and Troy could never solve the “problem” of “the homeless”, but they proved that they could love Karen and Steve as their neighbors. That made all the difference in the world. It took me over 60 years of life to figure it out, and I never once heard it in church; but at the risk of being redundant, I’ll say it again in the affirmative: we can only love people that we actually know. Only then can we know how to help in a way that best helps.
Several years ago, a local newspaper columnist offered some helpful insight. People on the street and/or experiencing homelessness frequently fall into one of three categories: 1) The have-nots. These are folks who for a variety of reasons have lost employment, income and their homes–often as a result of insurmountable medical bills in our backward system. They are people who have worked, can work and want to work but who have more things going against them than they are able to turn around on their own. 2) The can-nots. These are folks who for a variety of reasons often related directly to physical and/or mental health are unable to work at a form of employment sufficient to pay for their own housing and living expenses–but many with help can stabilize enough to do very useful and creative things with their lives. They often have creative gifts and abilities that are absolutely stunning when not stifled by the very struggle to survive. 3) The will-nots. These are folks who for a variety of reasons have become so alienated from life and society and/or who have become successful enough at living outdoors, panhandling and living off donations and handouts that they have no intention of living another way–at least not a present. But at some point they might change their minds and then find themselves with such a history that it takes an enormous amounts of resources to turn things around.
I’ve also learned that people in all three categories may have histories of abuse and turbulent childhoods that would make our toenails curl up if we knew the full extent of it. In the few cases where I’ve been privileged to have earned the trust of some people to learn a few details my response to them is often the same, “I admire how well you are doing.” Whatever a person’s life, whatever a person’s history, they are still a human being so long as they have breath in them.
For churches wanting to set up temporary winter shelters, the Red Cross is a gold mine resource to make it successful. For churches that want to provide temporary housing in one-week shifts for families in transition, the Daybreak Shelter program is tailor made to be implemented by a team of area churches working together. My home church, Resurrection Lutheran in Portland, has done it for 12 years.
A little tidbit fresh off the presses: http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf/2009/12/at_street_level_with_portlands.html
Roger: Thanks for sharing the link to Duin’s terrific column. I appreciate the point he leaves us with which is that giving money allows us to keep our distance from people that frighten us. They frighten us mostly because when we get to know them we realize how thin the veil between their reality and ours.
Your points above are good but I’d add that there are people on the streets who have grown up in perfectly good homes, with parents and siblings who have loved and supported them. But one wrong decision led to another and for reasons untold they ended up homeless while the rest of us who made poor decisions managed to find some other escape.
I’m eager for you all to learn more about Love Wins because I think Hugh and his friends are doing some of the most practical street ministry out there.
Karen: I concur with par. 2 and could give examples, but I must not reveal things about people I’ve come to know unless they specifically say so. I know a number of examples of the wrong decision progression that involved drugs that tragically are so powerful that only the first decision was really a decision. Drugs enslave.
Further re giving money. I don’t know a single helping agency that in these hard times is not juggling bills, holding paychecks and burning up every last cash reserve. If anyone out there is inclined to give money to someone on the corner, and unless you specifically know exactly what the recipient will do with it or you do it with them, PULEEEZ direct your gifts to any nearby helping agency, ministry, shelter, charity or food pantry with an established track record. While we all appreciate seeing a hungry person fed, the helping hands that are out there 24/7 when we aren’t have been pushed to the very edge. Unless they keep going, they need will only intensify.
Thanks for lifting up Love Wins, and do tell us more. We’ll pray for them next Sunday night. R.