I looked directly into his eyes and immediately looked away. He was homeless. I was scared.
I grew up safe and sheltered in the suburbs of Chicago. All of the evils of the world were only abstract concepts to me because I had little personal experience with those that were less fortunate than me. I knew they existed, but they often seemed just out of reach. Occasionally, my family would visit a larger city where these people were more visible, but as they sat on the streets begging for money, I enjoyed family vacations or youth excursions to places I considered lavish.
So you can imagine how different it was for me when I moved to the city of Chicago. Chicago felt cold and rough and sharp and entirely unwelcoming to a privileged young woman like me. My initial response was to fear the expansive range of people and life situations here. I avoided eye contact so they wouldn’t notice me and I pretended not to notice them.
I did this simultaneously as I went to Bible College with a deep desire to be more like Jesus. And as I looked at the stories in the Bible and I looked out into my city, I realized they weren’t all that different. Jesus interacted with “unsavory” and outcast people every day. But his attitude and perspective when encountering them was entirely different than my own. So I prayed a dangerous prayer: “Jesus, teach me how to love the homeless like you do.”
For the past couple of months, I’ve been on a mission to learn as much as I can about the homeless. I’ve talked to friends of mine who have worked in homeless ministry, I’ve asked the Lord to provide me opportunities to practice what I’m learning with homeless people around me, and I’ve looked at research and statistics about the homeless people in my city. The more stories I hear or statistics I read, the more I realize how truly ignorant I’ve been. And the more opportunities the Lord provides to let me practice what I’ve learned, the more ways I wish I would have done it differently. But I also acknowledge that my journey is never truly my own, and so I share it for your sake so that you might learn from my mistakes and ignorance and maybe do it even better. After months of learning and even more weeks full of writing, here is everything I wish I’d known about the homeless and how to help them:
Who Are the Homeless?
There’s a lot of stereotypes that exist about the homeless and even more assumptions. Some people consider them to be lazy good-for-nothings. They think that they’re homeless just because they refuse to work. Others think of the homeless with suspicion, assuming that they prey on the goodwill of tourists and the pity of good people for their own selfish gain. Some just don’t like to think about them because they smell and they look funny and sometimes they’re pretty strange. But the truth is that the homeless are just everyday people. The majority of people who are now homeless were once people with homes and families and friends and jobs, and then something happened. That something differs from person to person.
Sometimes it was a health crisis and the medical bills ate up all the money and resources they had left. One of my friends who works with the homeless told me a story of a man who spends most of his time trying to make enough money for his next medical procedure to drain the infection from his legs. It had gotten to the point that he couldn’t make enough money to find housing long term, so he just switched back and forth between hospital stays and begging on the streets to pay for his next hospital stay. If he had more money or resources, he could probably find more permanent housing, which would give him more time to heal and would cut down on his need for medical intervention. But at this point, he’s just trying to survive, which leaves more permanent solutions permanently postponed.
Other times, people are dealing with some sort of relational rift. Many women who are facing homelessness have come from domestic violence situations. A very common trait of most domestic violence perpetrators is that they isolate their victims from all other family members and friends until the only person she has is him. If she chooses to leave him, she often has no money, resources, or assets of her own to fall back on and because she’s been isolated from the community for so long, she often has no one else to go to. Thus, she is homeless and once again a permanent solution is difficult to find when she is just trying to make it to tomorrow. Even in the shelter system, there is often a lot of abuse and assault which leaves her stuck in a helpless state either way with no third option.
Sometimes, however, these relational rifts come when a family decides to disown a child for religious or lifestyle choices they disagree with or when a child has faced or cause difficulties which negatively impact the family. Those most likely to be homeless between the ages of 18-24 are youth who are LGBTQ, pregnant or parenting, disabled or mentally ill, or those who have been involved in the juvenile justice or child welfare systems.
Many, if not most, of those who face homelessness or chronic homelessness, are either veterans, mentally ill, or have been raised in communities that lie under the poverty line.
Why Does This Matter?
No matter the cause, something that is true of most homeless people is that they have very few resources, connections, or sources of community. This in itself makes it near impossible to do the two things that they need to do: find a job and find housing. Think about some of your own first jobs. You applied, and they asked for your resume, which included a phone number, email address, or mailing address to contact you at. What if you don’t have a phone? What if you have no way to access your email on a regular basis? What if you don’t have a permanent address? What do you do? And what about references? How do you provide them with character references if you have no community or connections? And how do you clean yourself up and dress nicely for a job interview if you have no shower or nice clothes? Most people hear about jobs through connections they have or through networking within their network. How do you do that if you don’t have one?
Think about your first apartment. How can your apartment application get accepted if most of the lines are left blank? Do you have a good credit history? Probably not. Do you have references? No. Do you have a job that pays you a wage that equals three times your rent? No, in fact, you might not even have enough money for the application fee and security deposit. And even if you did have all of these things, they might not accept you just because they are suspicious of your character merely because you’re homeless.
Both of these things become exponentially more difficult if you are dealing with health issues or mental illness.
I’ve heard people talk about those who are homeless with an air of distrust, “Why don’t they just get a job?” However, when we look more closely at the logistics involved, we realize it’s not that easy.
What About Addiction?
The biggest objection I’ve heard to helping the homeless is that they are just looking for money to fuel their drug or alcohol addiction, and that’s why they stay in this situation. There are a few things to be said about this that are important to realize.
Are many homeless people stuck in the cycle of addictions? Yes, the National Coalition for the Homeless has found that 38% of homeless people are alcohol dependent, and 26% are dependent on other harmful chemicals. But this isn’t just a homeless thing; this is a people thing. Addiction is more prevalent than you might notice, with over 20 million Americans over the age of 12 struggling with an addiction (excluding tobacco).
What is addiction, when you really think about it? Addiction is rock bottom. Addiction is the absence of hope. Apart from Christ, where do people find their hope? In their community? In their future? If you have neither, it is only logical that you would sink into a place riddled with depression, isolation, and the only friend that still helps with the pain: addiction.
I had a woman come up to me as I was leaving Target a few months back. She looked somewhat disheveled and had several bags with her, leading me to believe she was homeless. She asked for a few bucks to help, so I gave her my change from my recent purchase. She thanked me, and then leaned in and said “I’m just lookin’ for a beer” with a smile. I smiled back and wished her a good day.
As I walked away from that interaction, I had several options of how to feel. Should I be angry that she was using my hard-earned money to feed her addiction? I could choose anger. But that response would be a response that stemmed from fear, and that fear would only squelch my generosity. If I chose anger, I would be choosing to cling tighter to my money rather than seeking the Lord’s direction to lead my generosity. A response of fear in relation to finances never ends well.
Instead, I chose to smile. What an interesting interaction! It spurred compassion in my heart. If I was in that woman’s situation, I would probably be looking for a beer too! Which sounds more appealing? A quick sandwich to curb my hunger for a couple of hours, or a cold beer to take the edge off the constant reality that everything in my life is pretty close to hopeless? I would say the second. Is that the right response to hopelessness? Maybe not, but apart from Christ it would be only natural. So I couldn’t blame the woman for doing what she new how to do. The few dollars I gave her couldn’t change her situation or free her from her addiction, so I was led to respond in compassion and smile back at her. Maybe I couldn’t fix her entire situation with a few dollars, but when was the last time she had someone extend generosity to her and give her a genuine smile? I would leave the way she used God’s money up to him because it was never my money to begin with.
What Should I Do?
If the few dollars I have to give won’t fix this huge systemic problem, what are we supposed to do? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when we think of something as huge as homelessness, and often being overwhelmed pushes us to avoid the issue. Instead, I challenge you to take a step in the opposite direction. For those who already give generously to their homeless friends, maybe God is calling you into something bigger. But I suspect that this does not describe most of you reading this article. Instead, I suspect that you are much like I was a few months ago. I didn’t want to give money if it would feed an addiction. I didn’t want to trust people who might take advantage of me. I didn’t want to have a conversation with someone who might be telling me a fake sob story. I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing.
If that describes where you’re at, I encourage you to dream small. You can’t fix homelessness. But you can take small steps. Maybe that next small step is something truly tiny. Maybe your tiny step is just making eye contact and smiling at the man sitting on the corner. Maybe it’s stopping to have a conversation with someone you would normally be scared of. Maybe it’s loosening your grip on your finances and being generous for those who ask and trusting God with the results. Maybe it is starting to pray for the homeless around you. Tiny steps are steps too. Take a tiny step today. What might happen if an entire church full of fearful people with tight-fisted finances chose to take fifty tiny steps towards faithfulness?
Let me tell you a story. You remember that dangerous prayer I prayed for God to teach me to love the homeless? Well after several months of giving me opportunities to practice, He gave me a person to befriend. Her name is Ruby. Ruby is a homeless woman that often sits out on the corner across the street from my apartment. She is often fed through a catholic ministry nearby, but when I see her on the corner, she is still sitting out there all alone. So one day, after watching her for several minutes out my window, I heard the Lord tell me, “Go say hi.” So I did. I threw on my jacket and breathed a quick prayer as I bounded down the stairs of my apartment building. I crossed the street and said, “Hi, my name is Kayla, is there anything you need?” She said no and mentioned just eating dinner, so I asked her name. “Hi Ruby, it’s nice to meet you. I live nearby so we might see each other around.” And that was it. We said goodbye and I went back up to my apartment. Was it an earthshattering time of ministry? No. Did I give her anything? No. But I chose to see her. I chose to go out of my way to show her kindness and connect with her.
The next time I saw her, she was struggling to pull flowers out of the dumpster beside the flower shop I live above. I stopped before entering my apartment building and helped her hold the dumpster open, “Hi Ruby! It’s good to see you!” She told me she really wanted some eucalyptus today, and there was a white lotus flower she had seen that she was trying to reach. We talked as she tried to use another flower stem to retrieve it.
“Did you see the graduation today?” Ruby asked.
“No, I didn’t. What graduation?”
“There was graduation at Holy Name Cathedral down the street. It was very nice. Oh no–”
The lotus had just slipped from the top of the trash pile to the very bottom of the dumpster, completely out of reach. We grieved this fact but commented on how nice the weather was today. I asked if Ruby had eaten dinner yet, and she said that she had just eaten some soup. She said it was nice to see me and we parted ways.
The next time I saw Ruby, she was sitting on her corner again and I didn’t have anywhere to be that evening. It had been a hot summer day, so I grabbed a water bottle and brought it down to her. I asked if I could sit with her for a while and we talked. She told me about her different creative projects. She loved flowers and herbs and knew how to make different teas that could help her with different ailments. She told me about the different bracelets she had braided and showed me the mat she had woven out of plastic bags. I asked about her favorite flowers and asked her if she was from Chicago originally. She told me she was originally from the south, but her southern accent isn’t as noticeable anymore.
Ruby is not sitting on the corner every day, but I keep my eyes peeled for her. When I do see her, I try to say hi. Our interactions have been minimal, but I hope that I can continue to show her genuine kindness in a world that despises those in difficult situations.
Building a relationship with a homeless person in your city might sound like a giant leap, but for me, it started with a series of tiny steps. It started by learning to make eye contact with the homeless people I passed. It started with showing tiny acts of generosity like giving a banana to a man as I walked home from the grocery store or offering to pick up a few things for a woman who was on the street near the store I was walking to. It started by learning to see the people around me and asking the Lord to grow compassion within my heart for them. Can I change the problem of homelessness? Probably not. But I can take a tiny step, and you can too!
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