Difference Part 2

I have to share a couple more excerpts from What Difference Do It Make?

I had developed quite a do-gooder reputation for myself by refusing to judge “bad sorts”—bag ladies and vagrants, drug addicts, drunks, and runaway teenagers who sold their bodies for money.

Strangers.

But I was just now learning to do it for my own flesh and blood. I had no doubt that an ornery cuss like Daddy deserved to be tossed out on his can like a drunk—like when Mr. Ballantine’s son pushed him out of his car, motor still running, on the curb in front of the Mission. I had all this compassion for Mr. Ballantine, but it had taken me all this time to muster up compassion for the man who gave me life. And more than that. Earl Hall had been an alcoholic absentee father, crappy husband, and all-around curmudgeon, no question. But he had provided for his family for sixty-five years, which wasn’t true of many of the homeless I’d reached out to.

As a boy, I never missed a meal. I had a roof over my head, a cosigner for my first car. And Daddy had never asked me for money except in joking, and that was after I remodeled his house and he knew I was stacking it up.

Dad’s drinking never caused him to miss a day of work. Now he was an old man, his body failing, mind not far behind, with a wife who loathed him and a son who for most of his life had held him at arm’s length with nose pinched, as though holding a dirty diaper. A troublesome thought formed at the edge of my mind: was I so shallow, my do-gooding so superficial, that I could only set judging aside and help a person as long as his sins didn’t affect me?

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Since I been visitin a lotta churches, I hear people talkin ‘bout how, after readin our story, they felt “led” to help the homeless, to come alongside the down-and-out. But when it comes to helpin people that ain’t got much, God didn’t leave no room for feelin led.

Jesus said God gon’ SEPARATE us based on what we did for folks that is hungry and thirsty, fellas that is prisoners in jail and folks that ain’t got no clothes and no place to live (See Matthew 25:31-46). What you gon’ do when you get to heaven and you ain’t done none a’ that? Stand in front a’ God and tell Him, “I didn’t feel led”?

You know what He gon’ say? He gon’ say, “You didn’t need to feel LED ‘cause I had done wrote it down in the Instruction Book.”

Let’s be real. A lotta folks on the list that Jesus calls “the least of these” ain’t the ones you gon’ find down at the country club. No, most a’ them folks you gon’ find in the jail, or in the street. But we got to go to ALL the people—the rich, the poor, the lowdown, and the dirty—and show ‘em all we got the same thing for ever one of ‘em: the love a’ the Lord.

I think part a’ this problem is that too many folks ain’t ready to face up to the fact that to love the unlovable, they got to face people that they fear. They is afraid to get out of their regular livin space ‘cause they afraid it might be suicide, am I right? ‘Cause you wouldn’t be scared a’ nobody if you didn’t feel like they was gon’ do you wrong.

Most people want to be circled by safety, not by the unexpected. The unexpected can take you out. But the unexpected can also take you over and change your life. Put a heart in your body where a stone used to be.

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I’m glad the problem of homelessness is on the government’s radar. It’s just that the problem of homelessness will never be solved by government. That’s because government can put a roof over a man’s head and food in his mouth and even give him a job. But government can neither love a man nor lovingly hold him accountable. The chronically homeless, whether homeless through tragic circumstance or through messes of their own making, have a whole constellation of inner issues that food, shelter, and a paycheck won’t fix.

Like Denver says, “If folks like me had the ability to do what folks like you be tellin us to do, we’d a’ already done it.”

The chronically homeless need love, compassion, accountability, and someone to come alongside them and hold them steady as they limp along the winding, pitted road to wholeness.