Reflections on Two Years with the Homeless

I’ve spent the last, roughly, two years working at a homeless shelter. In fact, this is the first Monday in a long while that I haven’t spent at the shelter doing things like helping homeless men create and stick to a budget, look for work, gain self-esteem, and learn life skills like cooking, opening a bank account or brushing their teeth. I even spent most of last Monday cleaning up the mess from, and fixing, a backed up toilet and septic system. These are the things that go on at a homeless shelter. During these last two years I have seen many men come through the doors of the shelter. Some eventually moved into their own apartments/rooms and others had to leave and ended up back on the street. I have seen families reunited, people get promotions and addicts relapse. There have been many days where seeing the joy on the face of a guy entering the shelter knowing they wouldn’t have to sleep outside any longer or moving out successfully has made everything worth it, but there have been more disappointments than successes and at times the job has been harder than I ever imagined.

Because Des and I will be moving out of southern California after I graduate, Friday was my last night on the job so that I can focus on completing my coursework and graduating with my masters degree. It was a fun night on Friday. The guys there cooked me a going away meal of ox tail, cornbread and red beans and rice. I, of course, brought my famous collard greens to the meal. It was sad saying goodbye to some of the guys I have worked with for a while now, but it was fun to celebrate in that way, and I know it was a gift to them for them to be able to serve me in that way. I know one guy had been saving up for a month to buy the food for the meal. Anyways, after almost two years working with homeless people trying to help them gain employment, save money, pay off debts, stay sober, make life improvements and move into their own places these are some of the lessons I have learned:

1. All kinds of people become homeless and you can never make a value judgment on why someone is homeless. Everyone has a story and if you don’t know it you can’t judge. I have had people come through the shelter who became homeless for: getting released after seven years in prison and discovering their family had moved out of the state, losing their job for showing up to work and failing a random alcohol test after being kicked out of the house while going through a divorce after over 40 years of marriage, losing a job and apartment after falling down the stairwell at their apartment that was not properly lighted and spending a couple of months in the hospital recovering from several surgeries, being released from prison with PTSD and bi-polar disorder after being introduced to drug culture as a pre-teen by his mother, spending the last 20 years in and out of prison for drugs after being an emancipated foster youth with no family and a history of being sexually abused by foster parents, growing up homeless and caring for his homeless mother who refuses the psychological help she needs, falling off a roof at work and shattering his leg and not being able to go back to work after multiple surgeries and not having the worker’s comp coverage he thought he had and losing all he owned, and the stories can go on and on and on. People who are homeless are in need of compassion and justice not judgment and criticism. By treating all homeless people the same (usually as drug using bums who don’t want to work) we cripple ourselves from truly being able to meet the needs of any of them.

[Update: Check out this video I got from Larry James' blog as it points out the way in which we can't judge someone who is homeless and how they got there. What was Johnnie Lindsey supposed to do after being released from prison, after spending 26 years there wrongfully, with nowhere to go and no job history for two and a half decades?]

2. Homeless people, generally, need two things: homes and jobs. More businesses need to be willing to hire ex-felons and people without a stable job history. Each year in prison or without work makes it that much harder for someone to find work when they are ready to make a change in life. I’m even at the place where I’d support legal mandates on there being a certain number of jobs held for such people. There is no chance of people getting off the street when there are no jobs available to them. This must change.

There also needs to be affordable housing. Most people are homeless not because they want to be (though, admittedly, there is that segment of the homeless population) but because they can’t afford housing. This is especially true here in ridiculously priced southern California. Our current poverty standards are based off of a time when the majority of one’s income was spent on food. That’s right, there was a time you would have spent more at the grocery store than on your mortgage. That let’s you know how inflated our housing prices have become over the last several decades. Our understanding of poverty levels needs to change to reflect this new reality. Housing is WAY too expensive, and someone working a hard 40-hours a week as a general laborer or janitor simply can not afford a place to live. This is unjust and needs to be changes at multiple levels of society to address it.

3. I’m often asked by people if I “evangelize” in my job because I call the work I do “ministry.” No, I don’t, and I find it funny that people ask me that question. The assumption, of course, is that most of these homeless folk must not be Christians (because God blesses Christians with money I’m guessing?), but that assumption is wrong. The vast majority of the people who have come through the doors of the shelter I served at were not only “Christians” or believers but were tied to or members of specific congregations. Many middle-class people assume poor people aren’t Christians, but the truth is most of them in America are. In fact, they often believe in God much more fervently than comfortable folk do because, as I have been told by several of my clients, “all they’ve got is God.”

This is not to say everyone I’ve worked with has been a Christian or hasn’t struggled with their faith. And it’s not to say I didn’t have many “spiritual” conversations with clients. In fact, I probably had at least one such conversation with every client. I remember seeing one client specifically, after a hard and once again unsuccessful day looking for work, tearing up his Bible and throwing it in the trash can only to be at church again the next Sunday and telling me about what God was doing in his life the next week. He and I had many conversations about God, life, faith, Christianity, society and politics, and why so many Christians he knew weren’t willing to help him out and treated him like dirt. Trust me, many homeless folks “do” theology and Christianity at a much deeper level than we ever do. In fact, maybe it’s them who should be evangelizing us? (FYI, that client visited me the other day, after moving out about a year earlier, to let me know he’s held his job for over a year now and has saved almost $7,000. One of the success stories!)

4. Our communities are in denial. There are millions of homeless people in America, many of them children (over 100,000 in California alone!), and there are probably several in your town or city. I can not count how many of the local cities deny there are any homeless people in their borders even though I see them and work with them on a regular basis. The problem doesn’t go away if we just ignore it! There is something in us individually, but especially communally that wants to look the other way and pretend homeless people don’t exist. They do, they carry the image of God and are loved by God just as much as anyone else, and it is our duty to ensure that they, at the lowest end of our society, receive justice. As long as we act like the problem doesn’t exist we are complicit in the homelessness in our area. We have to stop living in denial and work for real change.

Anyways, even though I am done “officially” serving the homeless for a while I will not forget their presence in our society. As long as there continues to be homeless people living among us our work for justice and God’s kingdom is never done. May God be with you in your struggle to bring an end this this grave sin. Grace and peace.