Wednesday, January 30, 2013

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.

 

Thursday, January 3, 2013

I Just Wanna Get Warm



 The colors here are monochrome studies in one shade of grey
The good times and the hard times, cut from the same grey cloth
And all the fires that crackle here consume but do not burn
All light and no heat, and I just wanna get warm
I just wanna get warm  [i]


January welcomes a New Year, and with it the annual onslaught of guests who get way too cold for their own good.

It’s particularly harrowing for our Springs Rescue Mission neighbors who live in the fog of addiction or mental illness as they work through the challenges of being homeless in cold weather. Many of them don’t even notice there’s a problem until hypothermia or frostbite (or both) have set in. That’s a problem because when you add the confusion generated by hypothermia to the addled mental state of those neighbors, it can be really difficult to remember your need to get somewhere warm. Worse, by that time your body’s temperature regulators may be going haywire so you may feel the need to take off the layers of clothing that are saving your life at the moment. 

It isn’t an everyday event, thankfully, but the homeless community here in El Paso County loses people to the cold now and then. We wonder to this day whether the cold caught one of our RAP friends by surprise last month. We held his memorial service here not long before Christmas Day. 

Hypothermia and frostbite are both subtle at first. Hypothermia is a body temperature below 95° F. Depending upon your physical condition, hypothermia can begin to kick in when the air temperature around you is as high as 50° F. As one’s internal body temperature decreases, the very real possibility of heart arrhythmia increases.[ii] About 700 people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness are killed from hypothermia every year in the United States.[iii]

Frostbite, clinically defined, is the temporary or permanent skin tissue damage caused by prolonged skin-tissue temperature of 23° F or below.[iv] And the angels at Springs Rescue Mission’s Resource Advocate Program (RAP) are knee-deep in frostbite intervention this week. If frostbite has turned to gangrene, the intervention is not pleasant and quite costly to the community.

Bottom line is this: if we can help our neighbors who nightly face the cold stay warm, despite the challenges they face, they’re more likely to stay alive and well and make it to spring intact. Cold weather sleeping bags (mummy-style if possible) and warm socks are simple things we can offer to our neighbors on the streets during Colorado winters to make their lives a bit more tolerable. They are time-tested and proven help for anyone with the need to stay warm during long and frigid winter nights.

Will you join us in providing sleeping bags and socks to help the homeless be warm until they can be helped or healed? Just bring them by the Mission warehouse at 1 West Las Vegas St from 9:30 am – 4:00 pm Monday through Friday, or Saturdays from 9 – 11:30 am. Your donation today could help prevent frostbite or even worse for our neighbors.

They just want to get warm. Let's help them.