Conversation Point

In This Moment

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Filling out forms, for any variety of reasons, is a tedious necessity of life. Medical offices, employment agencies, educational institutions, credit card companies, even churches, are all tracking us by asking us to fill out forms. Name, address, and telephone number are standard. Some have a more detailed agenda, asking for all of the above plus where we work, how long we've been there, and whether we "rent, own, or other" where we live. The first two choices are common: renting frequently leads to owning, the great American dream. Other is for people who are outside those usual boundaries. House sitting, inn keeping, and dormitory dwelling all fit into this category. But so does homelessness.

In his book, Under the Overpass: A Journey of Faith in America, Michael Yankoski chronicles his choice to temporarily leave his comfortable upper middle class life for life as a homeless person. Accepting the challenge of his pastor to "be the Christian you say you are," Yankoski and a friend traveled among six cities in the United States, seeking out the Christian church's response to some of the most at need people in our culture.

But before setting out on this adventure, Michael Yankoski held little understanding of the day by day existence of a person with no physical home. Unless any of us have been homeless or worked directly with someone who is homeless, most of us share that ignorance. Consider then the basic structure of your day. Your alarm clock awakens you, you get up, shower, brush your teeth, have coffee and breakfast, perhaps organize and direct your family to begin their day, then head off to work yourself. How would your day be different if your home was several cardboard boxes duct taped together and tucked up against a bridge support so the wind would have a harder time blowing it away? Your alarm clock is the sunlight filtering in through the openings around your front door flap. Your bathroom is at the gas station a mile down the road, although a shower is a luxury you haven't experienced in quite sometime. Your first, sometimes only meal of the day, is at a series of soup kitchens. Work is a dream off in the distance. It is difficult to see yourself as a part of the rest of the everyday world when you are dirty, undernourished, and afraid most of the time.

While we who have homes can begin to imagine what homelessness is like, we cannot truly understand the daily frustration and misery of living in the wealthiest country in the world and still not having enough to even have the basics of food and shelter. What many of us do to cover that inadequate understanding is to blame those who are homeless for their own circumstances. If they hadn't squandered their money, or drank or gambled it away, they wouldn't be where they are. So, they need to figure their own way out of it, or we're enabling them, right? No, I don't think that's right at all. I would put what money I have on the bet that most people who are homeless didn't wake up in a comfortable bed one day, decide to walk away from it all, and head over to the grocery store dumpster to collect building materials for their new residence.

But Michael Yankoski and his friend did. They left a usual life and set out to discover how well we as Christians treat people who clearly have less than us, people who don't look very nice and smell very bad. The reviews of our response are mixed at best. Despite Jesus' explicit directive to treat people as we would want to be treated, and to think of each person we help as if they were Jesus himself, most people turned their eyes and their hearts and did not help the two travelers. The bright hope is that some did reach out and include the two men in loving, generous, tangible ways. Although having the choice to go back to their lives, Yankoski and his friend were not content in the wealth and ease to which they returned. Rather than joy, they expressed a realization of the "terrible dangers of lacking nothing."

Perhaps that is the point at which we who are comfortable in our homes get stuck, this dangerous position of lacking nothing. If we lack nothing physically we come to believe our material wealth is our salvation. Believing that, we more readily ignore those to whom so little would mean so much, blame them for their lack of initiative, and hold fast to the mind-numbing grace of the God of Consumerism. It's easy to do if fear of losing our material salvation is stronger than our love of God who always stands with the poor and disenfranchised.

Interesting, then, that on any form handed him, Jesus would have checked other. Jesus was homeless. Do we blame him for his situation? Would we welcome his own not very nice looking, smelly self into our churches and homes today?

Until next time, God's blessings.

posted by Cory L. Kemp @ 11:48 AM