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.