Miracle Music

Sometimes you just need to settle back, turn up the volume, and listen to your favorite tunes for awhile.  The right music can clear your head, soothe your heart, and help you cope with the day. At least that’s what it can do for Jason. (Me too, for that matter.)

When Jason first came in to the Resource Advocate Program at Springs Rescue Mission, he was angry and bitter. Kathy, his advocate, assisted him in applying for food stamps. But during that interview Jason learned that there would be a delay in his receiving the assistance. That set Jason off. He immediately wanted to give up. He didn’t care anymore, he told Kathy. He wasn’t about to make the phone call to get his final check from a recent employer.

Then Jason launched into a litany of hate. He hated the government. He hated the homeless community. He hated Colorado Springs. He hated the shelter where he was staying. He hated God. He even hated his mother (who doesn’t do meth on Sundays because she’s “religious”) for putting him in foster care at age 10.  Kathy knew she needed to redirect the conversation, and gently asked Jason what it would take to help him feel better. 

Jason softened a bit. He was quick to reply that listening to music was one of a very few things that could help him calm down and relax. The problem was that there was no real way for him to listen to music when he really needed to. So while Kathy was encouraging Jason to hang in there, she was also praying God would provide something to show his love for Jason. 

Later that day, someone like you dropped off an iPod at the Mission in hope that it would get to someone who really needed it. Kathy was able to give that iPod to Jason as a new-to-him way to access music. And since that event, Kathy has noticed the difference in Jason. He’s more open to conversation, and so more open to receive the help he needs to stabilize and move forward.

Miracle music has a beauty all its own.

The Key for Mike

Note: Mike has been featured in a couple of Light on Las Vegas Street blogs since January. I thought you might appreciate this update on Mike from my colleague Sarah Stacy, 

the Director of Spring Rescue Mission's 

Resource Advocate Program.

Early last fall, the Resource Advocate team at Springs Rescue Mission met Michael. Camper, drug addict, felon, and very quiet man.  What was notable about Mike at that time was that nothing about him was particularly remarkable.  He was never loud, attention-drawing or even looking for help.  He camped with a rowdy crowd and it’s possible that their general boisterousness accentuated his quietness.

             Mike's life changed in early January when he woke up in his tent with a foot so swollen he couldn’t put on shoes. Somehow he made the four-mile-plus trek to the homeless health clinic to learn that toes on both feet were frostbitten. He spent a little time in the hospital to make sure there was no infection and right away made his way to RAP to figure things out with his advocate.  As if this wasn’t trial enough, less than two weeks later his daughter was killed in an auto accident that left his youngest granddaughter on life support.

            “Until Miss Susie, no one ever cared about me." Mike’s advocate did work hard to make sure he had clean dry socks every day, a special pan to soak his feet, and some privacy in an unused office for that laborious task. How do you sit and soak in warm water when you live in a tent in the dead of winter?  Susie was with Mike when he got the news that his daughter had been killed, and she was there to listen to his pain through the process of hitchhiking to Denver on weekends to visit his precious granddaughter, Angel.  But there was another team of angels who came to Mike.  

             Lisa and Tim are faithful volunteers in Supportive Family Services who offered him prayer on February 23rd, and he accepted their offer and came to understand and accept the offer of his Heavenly Father for redemption and a new life. “I never knew it was that simple and that I didn’t have to earn it” Mike says frequently. Life certainly hasn’t become perfect for Mike since receiving Jesus, but he has been clean and sober, even through making the decision recommended by medical staff that he withdraw life support from his granddaughter who gently passed the next day. Still he has persevered. He has turned to God’s Word on an MP3 player for growth and encouragement. He has led one campmate to receive the Lord.

 And yesterday, he walked into my office, put the key to the first housing he's had in years on my desk, and simply said "Thanks." 

The key – maybe it really came long before the physical key to an apartment was in his hand.

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.

“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.