Waiting for the Call

One hour away from Springs Rescue Mission at a Denver hospital today, a precious one-year-old is on life support. A medical team there is waiting for the call from one of our neighbors – the grandfather of the child – to unhook the machines that are keeping her body alive.

Goodbyes have already been said. Preemptive tears have already been spilled. The pros and cons of one more visit have been weighed. Dave, the grandfather, could say volumes to his granddaughter with one more encounter. But how long do you keep going with a series of “just one more visit”? Dave has made a remarkable decision for someone who seems to have so little to hold onto: to let go of the baby for whom he’d someday hoped to build a safe and sound home.

It was a dream of sorts. Dave knew that the odds were stacked against them. Yet this year he took tangible steps forward to overcome those odds – receiving medical care that indicated he planned on sticking around for awhile, for instance. Maybe long enough to raise grandchildren. He took a serious look at housing and childcare options. He began thinking about jobs that would welcome his work experience.

Dave was expecting challenges in those areas. What he didn’t expect was a sudden and brutal traffic mishap that took his daughter a few weeks ago, and today will take his granddaughter. Homeless or housed, rich or poor, you never expect such things. Sometimes life itself levels the playing field in ways you never wanted.

Dave has not felt in control of his life for years now. The irony of doctors and nurses waiting for his phone call is not lost on him.Yet there is something sacred about Dave’s day today. His friends at the Mission and on the streets know it. He will manage a painful and loving call, and a choice few around him will hold him close in their hearts.

They will pray Dave makes a fresh decision to walk toward healing, and that he shows up at our door again tomorrow.

The Qualities of Youth and Neighbors Helping Neighbors

Tell me the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young… and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.

– Edmund Burke

The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement of danger. 

It demands the qualities of youth. 

– Robert F. Kennedy

I walked into the reception area at Springs Rescue Mission and saw a friend standing there. Two overloaded boxes of canned food filled his arms. I relieved him of one box and we began our walk across the parking lot to the warehouse. He beamed when he said, “This is from my daughter’s birthday party over the weekend. Sweet sixteen and she asked for her guests to bring canned food for the people the Mission serves instead of gifts for her. Pretty awesome, isn’t it?”

Yes, it is. We’ve benefited from dozens of such parties in the last year. Reports of those donations never fail to make us smile – maybe not as broadly as do the parents involved, but pretty close.

It is humbling to consider the contributions younger people in our community have made to the Mission in recent months. It is even more humbling to realize that those we serve, and the Mission, occupy such significant space in the minds of so many youth in the Pikes Peak Region.

There are scores of youth-driven fundraisers to benefit the neighbors we serve. There’s no way I can give credit to all of them. Not so long ago two area high school wrestling teams from Pine Creek and Discovery Canyon  high schools made us the beneficiary of gate receipts from a dual meet. Although the young men on the teams are fierce competitors on the mat (a good number had qualified for the state meet), they came together to help ensure that the Mission could care for families in need. A few months before , Rotary Medallion Champion Allie Morgan directed a gift in honor of her achievement from area Rotary Clubs to the Mission.

Youth and youth groups volunteer to serve the Mission in a variety of ways, some so frequently that they know Mission staff by name. Sometimes they plant, paint, rake, sort clothes in the warehouse, help set up and clean up events, and so much more. They come from small churches and mega churches and high schools and families. Sometimes they take on tasks that help us raise funds, as Mackenzie did in learning and testing a new way to help us raise money to purchase turkeys last holiday season. Again, naming each of them is beyond the capacity of this blog. But in every case, when our younger friends show up, special things happen.

Spring always brings proms and graduations and weddings, and thoughts of where all the time went in the lives of the kids we love. The Pikes Peak Region and friends of the Mission can celebrate the fact that hundreds of our youth show their character in being neighbors helping neighbors – a task which often demands the qualities of youth, no matter what our age might be.

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“While I Was Freezing…”

“It ain’t fun and games,” Mike told us. “Too cold. I was about ready to hit a cop to get a few nights in jail for hots and a cot. 

“You know what that means, don’t you?” Mike looked at us like we weren’t keeping up with the conversation. He might have been right.

We were following up on the reports of frostbite among our Resource Advocate Program clients at Springs Rescue Mission. Sarah, the chief RAP angel, asked Mike if he would chat with us. Mike agreed—as long as we’d tell more people about how the cold affected him and his friends.

Mike has frostbite. Before you escape to pleasant notions of frostbite being the leftovers of an innocuous 3 a.m. visit from Jack Frost or Suzy Snowflake, let’s cut to the chase. Frostbite is when blood literally freezes in your veins. It almost always starts in the extremities (toes, fingers). Then, if untreated, it works its way back toward your heart as gangrene.

Mike woke up one morning a few weeks back to find his left foot so swollen he couldn’t put his shoe on. A friend propped him up so he could limp four-and-a-half miles into town from their camp site to see a doctor. The doctor found frostbite in the toes of both feet.

No matter what the temperature since then, Mike has made the journey into the Mission to soak his feet six days a week. The regimen has restored normal color to the toes on his right feet, but not his left. There, two toes are still black. Mike has to make the hard call to allow the amputation of those toes or not. He hopes against hope the toes will recover color and circulation, like the ones on his right foot.

There’s no guarantee of that. And the longer Mike waits to make that call, the greater the possibility that gangrene will cost him his left leg up to the knee.

Mike weighs those odds even as he talks to us. Then he changes the course of the conversation.

He coughs to clear his throat. For all the drama that could so easily be leveraged out of his situation, Mike is matter-of-fact. “While I was freezing…”

It is clear Mike is searching for the right words instead of taking a dramatic pause. He thinks for a moment. “While I was freezing,” he says slowly and softly, “I talked with my son. He’s gone on. Talked to my parents and a couple of friends who have all passed, too.

“Couldn’t feel anything from my knees down or my chest up, so I poured kerosene over myself to commit suicide. I just didn’t get it lit.

“These ladies [the RAP staff] got me through. They’re helping me get what I need. It’s worth the time I spend here. I want to work. I want to get past this and find a job and be warm someplace I can call home.

“We light candles in the tent. We use little propane bottles and a burner to try to stay warm. But it wasn’t enough to stop this” – Mike points to his feet – “from happening.”

What does it mean that Mike can say with not an iota of hype, “While I was freezing”? Not a metaphor. Not a simile. Just his blood freezing in his veins.

It ain’t fun and games.  

Ain't Worth Spit

It didn’t take many discussions with the homeless neighbors we serve at Springs Rescue Mission for me to understand one secret they share with all of us: when it’s all said and done, our behavior—yours, mine, theirs—depends way more on our view of ourselves than we might think.

The biggest challenge for many of them, just as it is for each of us, is to own the truth that God cares for each of us, even with our stinking moods and damaged behavior on the table in the light. One of the most difficult truths of the universe for many of us is that God still loves us with all our stuff in plain sight. Mother Teresa summed it up: "The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread."

A few colleagues and I were having an informal conversation with Martin, who camps a few miles from the Mission on land outside Colorado Springs. Martin lost contact with some of his family after spending too many years under the influence. He has lost others he loves to violence and disease. When someone approaches Martin, he pulls into himself relationally and physically. He is conditioned, by years at the business end of condescending looks and cruel comments and treatment as an untouchable, to cringe until the person has passed.

Martin explains, “They have a place to go. We don’t. They don’t know what it’s like for us. No way.

“A lot of people treat us like we ain’t worth spit, anyway.”

Martin is tormented. But he also knows his hunger for acceptance and encouragement is being met somehow by showing up at the Mission for a cup of coffee six days a week.

In Jesus’ day, any lasting physical affliction was commonly assumed to be caused by a great sin. It was fairly common for people with such afflictions to be spat upon by upright citizens even as the afflicted were begging for alms. In fact, one Sabbath day a blind man heard someone making the sounds of gathering spittle.  He braced himself in case that someone loosed it in his direction.

But this time, the spit didn’t hit him. It landed in the dust at his feet. He heard some rustling and a pair of hands rubbing together and then felt mud on his eyes. It was an experience with someone spitting he’d never had before.  

Then the blind guy heard a voice telling him to go wash off the mud in a pool of water. It was treatment he’d never heard of. The pool was about 600 yards away. He’d break some religious rules by journeying that far, but so had Jesus by making the mud. So the blind man went, washed, and could see.

He’d never think about the sound of someone spitting in the same way again. He wouldn’t feel the need to recoil in self-loathing when someone approached him.   

If you want to look at them this way, you can see every person who is a prime candidate for being a social outcast (e.g., homeless, at-risk, bullied at school, ridiculed at work) as being someone in whom the very work of God is waiting to be shown. We need to offer them life experience that demonstrates, rather than denies, their intrinsic value. 

Nothing will change the way you view the people living on our streets like taking some time to meet them.

They’re worth spit to Jesus, after all.