Guest Blog: They Live at the Bottom

Sarah Stacy is one of the Resource Advocate "angels" I often refer to in Light on Las Vegas Street. A tireless champion for the chronically homeless in the Pikes Peak region, Sarah manages the Resource Advocate Program for Springs Rescue Mission. The focus of her job (which she loves) is people at high risk who have often been written off by friends, family and the community at large. I've been pestering Sarah for several months to let us hear what's on her mind through a guest blog. As you're about to find out, she delivered!

,

“My clients don't hit bottom; they live at the bottom. If we wait for them to hit bottom, they will die. The obstacle to their engagement in treatment is not an absence of pain; it is an absence of hope.” Outreach worker (Quoted in White, Woll, and Webber, 2003).

This quote resonates with me as a Resource Advocate in the Springs Rescue Mission's Resource Advocate Program (RAP). The chronically homeless with mental illness and addiction that we serve have no basis in their life or life-skills set to desire treatment of their illness, their addictions or their chronic homeless state. They have no money, they have no relationships or support systems, and often they don't even have a roof over their heads. 

And yet they are wonderful, uniquely created humans with great strength and courage buried under years of abandonment.  They are persistent in obtaining the necessities of physical survival like food, showers, laundry and good shoes to walk the many miles required to survive.  They have amazing and unexpected good humor as they deal with the realities of life on the streets. These are the lambs God has given the Resource Advocates at Springs Rescue Mission to feed according to His Word in John 21:15.  I rejoice in that calling, because these lambs are easy to love and respond positively to the most basic of human courtesies. And I benefit far more than the lambs do in the course of obeying the command to feed them.

There are some who fail to enter or respond to treatment because they are not experiencing real pain from the effects of their addictions. These are people in families where the family suffers the pain, where the consequences seldom become life or death; family that continues to bail addicts out of jail, family that continues to provide shelter and food and protects individuals from the harsh realities of loss in addiction.

That is not the case for the clients of RAP. By and large, they are middle- to late-middle aged white men who have lost all contact with family and have destroyed every relationship they've ever had. A few are quite young and already experiencing multiple encounters with the criminal justice system. They have frequently worn out their welcome on friends' couches, so they endure the rigors of living outside. Without point-blank asking, I believe that almost all of them have been repeatedly abused from a young age – sexually, verbally and physically. Those who are not victims of outright abuse suffer the effects of very dysfunctional and non-supportive families of origin. 

Treatment for chronic homelessness doesn't really exist outside of the Rescue Mission, and treatment for mental illness is difficult to come by when you have no financial resources or insurance. (Colorado ranks 47^th in the nation in availability of psychiatric treatment beds.) Almost as bad, there are very few drug and alcohol treatment programs geared to the homeless. Even if there were programs available to those with no income, making a transition through detoxification and treatment at the same time as making a transition to living in a building is extremely stressful.

How then, should mere care and ministry workers respond to this condition? The answer is amazingly simple: be a bringer of hope, and sit back and watch as God uses hope to move people with addictions and illnesses into treatment and those on the streets into homes and families! 

A recent study actually measured improvements in hope among clients of a homeless day center and the results were surprising. They learned that activities as simple as attending peer-support groups for addiction and seeking advocacy in obtaining housing can improve the level of hope our clients self-reported. Baby steps taken with a supportive person alongside actually deepen the perception of hope among the hopeless.

There are many ways that an advocate who works with the hopeless can bring growing awareness that recovery is possible:

• Recognize the humanity of each homeless, addicted and mentally ill person you encounter. That's the easy way to begin nurturing the God-given life deep inside of our vulnerable neighbors. The homeless person in front of you has a name and a story. And chances are, that story is deeper than you ever imagined. Can you imagine what your life would be like if you were a body in a line at a soup kitchen, a number on a loaned towel at a public shower facility or the source of the scent that has other library patrons wrinkling their noses in disgust?

• Help the addicted person in front of you to count their strengths. Addiction and chronic homelessness eat away at hope slowly. When a hopeless person can recount the strengths they already possess and when those strengths are affirmed, validated and nurtured by an advocate, baby-step changes begin to occur. The end result of that journey is the birth of hope for a changed situation.

• Understand and communicate that homelessness and addictions are chronic conditions and recovery may take some ups and downs. If an advocate takes relapse and discouragement in stride as part of the process, steps are made toward incremental recovery. Recovery is not an all-or-nothing deal. Often the effects of different encounters and different attempts at sobriety and treatment are cumulative. Studies have shown that most people who have entered into stable recovery had three to four unsuccessful attempts at recovery in the previous eight years.

• Let the addicted or homeless person you know take the lead in their own recovery. As a middle class American most likely you have a clear vision of “how to”. Your ideas and cultural values may actually present obstacles to a person to whom they are foreign. If the individual you are working with has a goal of obtaining housing and you know that they have a criminal record and lack of finances that precludes housing you can still name the goal “obtain stable housing”. There will just be a few extra steps to getting there for some of the chronically homeless, like getting an income from a job or disability payments, learning to pay bills, and staying sober enough to remember where the home is.

• Love unconditionally. If we believe that recovery is a process with ups and downs, we won't be disappointed or judgmental when our homeless friend has relapses and difficulties, we will love steadfastly and fiercely. We can support and encourage the next forward step knowing that eventually there will be more “ups” than “downs”.

We are the hope-bringers to those who live in addiction and chronic homelessness but we as individual providers are not responsible for their recovery. Our friends are each responsible for their own recovery with the anointing and guidance of a Father in Heaven who loves them more than we ever will be able to. It's that love of God, shown on earth by our actions, that can bring freedom, peace and recovery.