Maybe Someone Knows

I've been thinking a lot lately about the homeless.  It's winter now, and it's cold, and there are thousands of people living in my city that do not have a place to sleep at night - and that bothers me.  I think, in theory, it bothers most of us.  But it's also a complex issue and there aren't any easy solutions - and I've struggled for many years on how Jesus would want us, as Christians, to respond to the issue of homelessness in our city.  I stumbled on this note that I wrote almost four years ago after an experience that I had with a homeless woman, and the end of it pretty much sums up exactly what I would have written if I had encountered her today.  This is not a post with answers.  This is a post with questions, and questions can make us uncomfortable - but if there's one thing I know, it's that God often lives in the uncomfortable.  Maybe through our questioning, we can find Him here.

[winter 2008]

Maybe somebody can help me understand this.

I left work today around 6 pm and I was TIRED. This weekend was extremely draining and I hadn’t been feeling well all week, so I was just anxious to get home and relax. To top it off, I was completely spiritually depleted - my time with God has been practically non-existent over the past few days. My body found the very thought of getting up at 5 am highly amusing… and even when my body decided to cooperate, my mind was in a complete fog. I had missed church on Sunday, and to put the icing on the cake I apparently missed the second coming of Pentecost at prayer meeting last night.

So I’m running on fumes here, and my only goal is to get home and try to get back to some semblance of normalcy.

Enter Jesus.

I’ve found that Jesus and “semblance of normalcy” really don’t belong in the same sentence.

As I walk into the subway station, I hear a lady shouting at passersby: “SCUSE ME, MISS! SCUSE ME, MISS!” I became irritated, first because I now had to contend with the Chris Brown song which had immediately launched itself into my head, and second because I didn’t want to be hollered at. I wanted to be HOME.

“SCUSE ME, MISS! CAN YOU BUY ME SOMETHING TO EAT?!?!?!?”

Top of her lungs. You know those voices that could just cut right through glass? I had to suppress an urge to shoot her a dirty look and clap my hands over my ears. People everywhere were filling the subway station, ignoring her and moving to their destinations – I’m not even sure if she knew which “MISS” she was asking to "‘scuse her." I didn’t even make eye contact and ran down the subway steps, right as the train was approaching. Hallelujah.

As I’m running down the steps, I thought about Jesus. I have a hard time with the “What Would Jesus Do?” campaign, because I’m convinced that the answer to that question is most often “who knows?” Jesus was ALWAYS doing things that people didn’t expect. I can barely understand the things that he DID do sometimes… I certainly can’t be trying to figure out what he WOULD have done in present-day situations. But, nonetheless, I thought about Jesus and I thought about what He would want me to do in this situation. Directly in front of me was an open subway door, asking me to step inside and let the doors close on any morsel of guilt that might remain on the platform. Directly behind me was a long set of stairs and a screaming lady channeling Chris Brown.

I honestly can’t say what caused me to turn around and start back up the stairs. I just did it. I might have turned around out of a sense of guilt that I hadn’t spent time with Him lately, and my performance-driven self subconsciously wanted to earn some Jesus points. I may have simply decided that going to buy the woman some food would be easier than dealing with the mental tornado of condemnation that would have been waiting for me had I ignored someone in need. Or I might have been genuinely moved by the Holy Spirit to have compassion that certainly didn’t come from me and my irritated self. Whatever the reason, I started back up the stairs. And interestingly enough, when my feet moved, my heart moved. I immediately began to pray, asking the Lord to remove any messed-up motive that might be inside of me, and to just give me the words and the heart to do whatever He wanted me to do. Compassion was birthed. It certainly wasn’t overflowing yet, but it was there.

I went up to the woman and smiled at her, and she “’SCUSE ME MISS”ed for what must have been the fiftieth time. I asked her what she would like to eat, and she told me ham and cheese. Oh, and some hot chocolate. Oh, and some pain medication because she hurt her knee.

I smiled at her and told her I would be right back. She wisely pointed out that if I left the station, I would have to pay to get back in. I told her that it was okay – I had an unlimited MetroCard. I got the sandwich and hot chocolate, thinking that I had pain meds in my purse, and came down the stairs. When I went to swipe my card, I realized what the woman was talking about – JUST USED flashed at me across the screen. I couldn’t swipe my MetroCard for another 15 minutes. Suppressing a sigh, I got out my wallet and bought a $4 MetroCard just so that I could get back in. I got back in and she immediately asked for the pain medication. I went rifling through my purse and realized that I no longer had them in there. She begged me to go upstairs with her and buy her some pain medication. Apparently someone had come up to her and kicked her in her knee and then ran off as she was sleeping in the subway the other night. Someone please tell me how people can be such overt jerks.

We went upstairs and at this point I’m starting to feel completely played. I could tell that she was going to milk me for all I’m worth… I heard her behind me talking about a wrap for her knee, and a bottle of water for the pain meds, and finding a place for her to sleep, and I almost lost it. The ounce of compassion that was birthed on my way up the stairs was flickering out and my wallet was getting lighter and lighter without an ounce of gratitude or even civility from this woman. Jesus, forgive me.

We got up the stairs and I finally turned to really look deeply at her for the first time. She couldn’t have been more than 5 feet tall and she was very heavyset. She was wearing black sweatpants and two or three shirts with a blue cardigan and a grayish-white “fur coat”. A scarf was wrapped around her head as a makeshift hat, and she carried three or four grocery bags tightly in her ungloved hands, containing what looked to be a few socks and old pieces of food. This time, a real smile formed on my face… and she smiled back. I found out her name – Evelyn – and I called 311 to find out if there was a nearby place that she could stay. She immediately started talking about how she did NOT want to go to “John’s place,” which I eventually figured out was the name of a shelter in lower Manhattan – I couldn’t figure out why because she was talking very fast and wasn’t making sense. After being transferred three times by 311, I finally got through to someone who took a description of her and said that someone would be there shortly to pick her up and take her to a safe place.

She was still begging for pain medication, so I walked with her to CVS and found the medicine aisle. I reached for the Tylenol and she refused – she wanted Motrin. She then announced, loudly, that she needed to go to the bathroom and thrust her bags into my hands and walked off toward the pharmacy. I was unbelievably frustrated… but at the same time I began to find her somewhat amusing. For the next fifteen minutes in CVS, she babbled almost incoherently about God knows what, and I was grinning up a storm as I bought her Motrin, a bottle of water and an Ace bandage. I could tell that somehow, God had given me the compassion that I lacked.

By the time we got back outside, it was FREEZING cold. Neither of us had gloves and I was holding all of her bags. I started trying to talk to her about the Lord – she claimed to be a Christian but wasn’t really able to put too many coherent thoughts today. Apparently she used to go to Brooklyn Tabernacle – she knew where it was, at the very least. She was talking about how Satan was hurting her and how she tried to accept Christ a few times but it didn’t work. Then the next second she was talking about something completely different. She cut me off anytime I started to speak to her. We waited for the van to come pick her up for almost 20 minutes before I checked my phone and found a voice message saying that they had come (while we were in CVS) and left because there was no one there. Now what, Lord?

As we were standing there waiting, I looked around at the corner where I was standing at Fulton St and William in lower Manhattan. I scanned my area and located 5 homeless people just within the area that I could see. FIVE! On one block! My heart absolutely sank to the ground… here I am, trying to help one person get a meal and a little bit of pain relief – who’s helping the other 5? The other 25 that are probably within a half-mile of where I stood? The hundreds in lower Manhattan alone? The thousands in NYC?

I finally decided to get a cab for Evelyn to take her to the shelter, and stood for 10 minutes as not a single cab came by. We finally moved to a different corner and a cab pulled up and I got her inside. I asked the driver how much to get to Beaver Street near Bowling Green, and he said $7. I opened my purse and a $5 was all that I had left after the pain medication, the Ace bandage, the water and the food. We were at a stoplight that had just turned green and all of the cars behind me began to honk. It had taken Evelyn a good 30 seconds to even get into the cab… getting her out would have been even longer. I looked at the driver with absolute desperation, and he immediately said that $5 would be okay. I praise God for that cab driver. I had to get in because Evelyn said that they might not take her if she didn’t have a “referral” – I had no idea what that meant but apparently I had to get in the cab and take her there.

The shelter was COMPLETELY hidden –I don’t know how she even remembered where it was. When they looked her up in their system downstairs it said that she hadn’t been there in two years. Two years! She was there two years ago. Has she been homeless for two years? Why hasn’t she been back there in two years if she knew it was a place where she could stay? None of my questions were answered, and even more began to form. The place was dingy and dirty, but it was FILLED with people sitting around at tables, talking and eating sandwiches. Some were asleep, lying across four chairs. Others were sitting on the floor, staring off into space. There was a TV on but no one seemed to be paying attention. I felt like I had wandered into another world.

I can’t explain it, but by this time I felt a kinship with Evelyn. I could barely understand anything that she was saying, and I have no idea how much of what she was saying was true, but I was able to make out that she was a diabetic and that she took “meds” for some type of psychological disorder. I had no idea how long it had been since she had taken the medication that she needed, or where her family was or what kind of drugs she was on. But she made me smile.

As I got her settled in the shelter, I started to look at people and smile. I felt almost at home among them. I felt that this might have been a place where Jesus would have come to hang out. Maybe, had He first come in 2008, He would have called some of His disciples from a place like this. I can see Him walking in and settling himself on a table and beginning to speak life. I felt a mix of despondency and relief – hopelessness in their situations but yet comfort in knowing that they had somewhere to sleep at least for tonight.

I finally left Evelyn at the shelter – she told me that she was going to come back to BT and that she was going to wait for me in the morning in the subway station. She asked me to bring her some multivitamins. I told her that I would bring them. She happily waved goodbye, and opened up her ham and cheese sandwich to begin to eat.

I walked outside and my brain shut down. It hasn't yet been able to restart. I couldn’t process what had just happened, where I had just been, what I had just done. I couldn’t process how unbelievably un-Christlike I was in my attitudes and in my timidity and I couldn’t process how Christlike it was for me to be in a dirty, hopeless, sin-ridden place and see beauty.

Maybe someone can help me understand.

Maybe someone can help me to figure out how there can be 5 homeless people in the eyeline of almost every New Yorker at every given moment, and we ignorantly walk past them as if they were inanimate objects.

Maybe someone can help me understand what good it does even to spend two hours emptying your purse and sacrificing your comfort for one… while thousands of others will freeze and starve tonight.

Maybe someone can help me figure out how Jesus, in His perfect love and His compassionate heart, was able to walk past some who were in need of healing because He could only go where His Father led.

God must be in constant pain. I could hardly bear to see 5 people around me in need of help, and I’m just about as rotten a sinner as could be. How can God stand it, when millions upon millions of people around the world are suffering excruciation pain, torture, starvation, disease, violence? How can His perfect heart survive this?

Maybe someone can tell me what on earth I’m supposed to do about it.