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.

“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.  

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.

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[i] Mark Heard, “I Just Wanna Get Warm,” © 1991 Ideola Music/ASCAP.

[ii] http://www.thesurvivaldoctor.com/2012/01/03/symptoms-of-low-body-temperature/

[iii] http://sleepingbagsforthehomeless.com/

[iv] http://www.healthscout.com/ency/1/453/main.html

Crochet Synapses, Ladies Who Knit and Other Miracles

Have you ever encountered a situation in which you felt completely out of your element?

Today, I’m thinking about my dear Grandma Nell trying to teach me how to crochet while I was a sixth grader recovering from an appendectomy. I clearly needed something to keep me busy. Against all odds, she brought over a crochet hook (maybe two; I’ve tried to forget), yarn and patiently, painstakingly tried to teach me the fine art of crocheting.

I just didn’t get it. The proverbial light never went on. No one was home in the part of my brain where the crochet synapses were housed.  I was overwhelmed. My stomach began to hurt and my appendix was already gone.

My grandma took mercy and gently removed the mystifying crochet stuff from my hands.

Mind you, I have many family members and friends for whom crocheting is second nature. But the art and science of the hook and yarn are still beyond me. Now as then, when someone enters the room with crocheting material meant for my use I roll myself into a ball and wait for the cartoons to come on. I’m simply overwhelmed.

My situation with crocheting is rather humorous. It is not a crippling thing for me to lack crocheting skills in the bigger picture of life.

But what if the basic stuff of life left you utterly confounded? That’s the situation in which many of our neighbors in Springs Rescue Mission's Resource Advocate Program (RAP) find themselves. Through RAP, scores of chronically homeless friends in need receive the encouragement and coping skills needed to get through the month. A few weeks ago my colleague Sarah sent a progress report on several people who were no longer overwhelmed by things that just a short time ago left them stymied:

“Jeremy went to the pharmacy and got his own meds for the first time ever!”

“Willie Lee came and told us that his meds didn’t seem to be working (amazing self care, first time!)  And on the advice of his Advocate, he promptly went to the VA clinic and got increased doses (after a blood test confirmed that the levels WERE down).”

“Holly and Darrin have been chronically homeless living in addiction – they each entered a treatment program this month.”

“Krystle regained custody of her two children from Department of Human Services and is second on the waiting list to enter the Salvation Army Fresh Start Program.”

 “Will has been homeless for more than two years.  He moved into housing very near his mother’s nursing home and thanks to a lovely donor, he was gifted with a new afghan for his bed.  (This will be a new part of our program – when you move into housing, the ‘ladies who knit’ will make a bed covering.)”

That last item is proof that ladies who knit can be the source of miracles that comfort and encourage. (Just sayin’, in spite of my being crochet-challenged.) In fact, lots of people pitch in to help make miracles out of things that previously overwhelmed our chronically homeless neighbors. One way you can make a big difference right now is to visit www.indygive.com/srm. Then find and follow the prompts to make a donation to support RAP. Even $10 can make a huge difference to help a chronically homeless neighbor through the month!