Three hours with people who did  not look like me, who don’t have homes like mine, who don’t have jobs like mine, and who don’t believe the same way I do. I spent three hours with people who care about me not because of material things, but because I am their friend and the feeling is mutual.

Love Wins sponsored a community cookout and the poor spent time together. Some of us were poor in spirit, some poor in money, some poor in friends, but we all gathered to celebrate the freedom we have as citizens of our country. There weren’t any prayers prayed, there weren’t any invitations given, we just showed up to love and be loved. I guess like we like to say, Love Wins.

Note from Hugh: This is the first of several posts that will talk about what happened on the 4th of July in Moore Square. Pictures are coming soon.

Thus ended the email from a jubilant mother, who was bringing me up to date on her baby’s heart condition - the surgery, the recovery, the near perfect healing and the extremely optimistic prognosis for the future.

I was happy for the healing and the recovery, but is it really fair to call this God blessing them? I mean, they live in an affluent area, both of the child’s parents have college degrees, they have health insurance, they live 30 minutes from one of the premier medical facilities in the country and have a wide circle of friends and family. Can you really imagine that this could have went down differently? Maybe this is just life for them - the way things work in their world.

Just like for my friend Dave*, the way life works is to be given the run-around at three different clinics over a period of four months because he blacks out when he bends over at the waist. Dave does not live in an affluent area - quite the opposite, in fact. And even though he does live within 30 minutes of that same world class health care facility, he is not allowed in, because he does not have health insurance. He normally earns his own living, but landscaping is hard when you keep blacking out.

When I saw Dave a few weeks ago, he was upbeat. He was drinking a cup of coffee with me at our Sunday morning thing we do. I ask how his health is, and if they have figured this thing out.

“Heck no! I don’t think they know what they are doing,” he says. “I am tired of it, to tell you the truth. I just want to get back to working - I am having to pass up some big jobs.  But really, I don’t complain. God is good. I have not went hungry, lots of people care about me. I am truly blessed.”

to be continued…

* as always, names changed for privacy purposes.

We don’t like to admit it, but most of us are hobophobic. If they are not cleaning our office or house or waiting our table, we would rather poor people not be around. They often have issues that have contributed to their poverty, such as poor education, poor social skills or poor hygiene.

We can make hobophobia go away, but it involves actually listening to poor people, not talking at them.  It means seeing them as people and not as furniture. It means getting outside our own self-righteousness and our self-assurance and getting to know them.

I am posting below the things we need: This list will be updated daily as offers of things roll in. If it is not on this list, we probably have it covered. If you want to help with something on the list, just tell us in the comments and someone will email you back.

The list: updated 6-26-2009

I love his work - he does such a great job of pointing to the hypocrisy in our culture. He shows us the irony in the everyday. I highly recommend you check him out.

In any event, Random House published a collection of his work a few years ago, called Wall and Piece. In the back was Banksy’s Manifesto, as he called it, a selection from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. I love what it says about our humanity, and our need to be humanized. I would submit that any gospel that does not do for people what the lipstick does for these women is not good news at all.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Recently I watched a movie that displays it really well. The movie is Where God Left His Shoes (http://www.wglhs.com/). It shows what happens people are kicked out of housing and the daily struggles they face. I challenge you to watch it and see what it makes you think of. It is the best movie that involves a homeless family that I have ever seen, and is, in my experience, very true to life.

[Hugh's Note: While I have not yet seen the movie Chad mentions, I would also recomend The Soloist as a movie with a realistic depiction of the pain of homelessness and the triumph that can come through relationships.]

Similarly, one of the main reasons my phone rings as often as it does is because I get calls from congregations and individuals who want to help a person who is homeless or near homeless, but they don’t know what resources are available.

That is why we have created RaleighHomeless.info, a website packed full of information and resources for those who are homeless and those who want to help the homeless.  We are still finishing it, but I wanted to go ahead and get it out there, so you could start sharing it with people you know. Right now the resources are geared primiarly to the homeless, but eventually we will have resources for congregations that want to reach out to the homeless as well.

The easiest way to get the news out and get in Google and the other search engines quickly is if you link to the new site - so if you have a blog, facebook, twitter, etc. it would be great if you could link to RaleighHomeless.info, even if you just mention it in a blogpost or tweet about it.

Also, if you know about resources we have not mentioned on the site, feel free to mention them in the comments below, or contact us through the new site.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the homeless are increasingly wired - email, laptops and cell phones. I remarked on this a while back, and see it only increasing as we become more and more connected as a society.  Also remember that virtually no homeless adult was born that way - most had jobs, houses, families, etc. before the precipitating event that drove them out of their residence. When you become homeless, you do not become stupid, forgetting how to set up a hot mail account, how to email your family, how to cruise craigslist looking for jobs, etc.

Several weeks ago, the media made a big deal out of several studies that show that the poor are much more generous than the wealthy. This has very much been my experience - I told a touching story about one I was the recipient of such generosity here. My favorite quote from the article:

“We’re not scared of poverty the way rich people are,” he said. “We know how to get the lights back on when we can’t pay the electric bill.”

And for all of you who were wondering about Emily - I saw her this weekend and she told me her husband is in jail right now, and looks like he will be there for several months. Pray that while he is in there we can get her to leave so he can’t continue to victimize her when he gets out.

• Her husband beats her up.
• Her husband leaves home.
• She announces that this time it is over - she is leaving him for good.
• He comes back.
• They are together again, and she tells me this time he has changed.

I have watched this happen at least five times. At least five times, I have held her gently as she cries, so as not to hurt her bruises. Five times I have told her I would put her on a bus to anywhere in the country or get her to a safe house, where her husband could never find her. Five times she has told me she would think about it and let me know. Five times she has told me this time, it was different and five times, she took him back.

When I saw her a few days ago, she told me he was much better this time. “I think he has really changed this time”, she says, just like she said the four times before that.

I have no idea what to do for her, other than to be there and to continue to pray for her (and to ask you to pray for her). She is so desperate to be loved, she will take what passes for it at the cost of broken ribs and black eyes. One of my biggest fears right now is that he is going to kill her. When she is most lucid, she admits this is possible as well. Yet she takes him back.

I used to think my being out here was about fixing things. Sometimes it is. But most of the time, it is just being someone who will still love you when you make a fool of yourself for the fifth time.

*Names changed for privacy

I am meeting with the pastor of a medium sized church, part of [Really Huge Denomination]. We are in a quiet coffee shop, drinking $4 cups of coffee while talking about poverty. Lucky for me, he is buying.

He asks me this question, I am pretty sure, not because he really wants to know, but because he is not sure what else to ask. In his world, there are numbers to go by - you divide the number of results by the financial cost and the result is how successful it was.

I try to tell him why the world I work in can’t work that way. When you are dealing with individual people, success is hard to quantify. I could tell him that out of maybe 50 people I have a relationship with, three have moved into more permanent housing this year and one of them has decided to follow Jesus, but that would have anything to do with Maria, who still prostitutes herself in order to pay for her drugs.

I don’t know how to put a cost ratio analysis on sitting next to a transgendered person as she cries because she is alienated from her family. Or being told by someone who has had ample reason to hate the church that she attended services last week for the first time in years. How do you decide how much to invest in someone who always lets you down, yet tells other people that you are the brother he never had?

Statistics are safe. Statistics are clean. If you hear that 20 people enter a job program and one year later, 15 of them are still working, that sounds nice - but it doesn’t tell you the struggles they endure to get clean clothing to work in, the challenges of finding a place to shower, the long nights of crying in the back seat of the car they are sleeping in as they battle the urge to drink.

We don’t deal in statistics. We deal with people. We don’t count heads, we count friends. Friends are messy. Friends are inconvenient. Friends let you down. 

The pastor is less than satisfied. I understand. Most days, I am less than satisfied too. But if you are going to treat humans like they are made in the image of God, you have to let people make their own choices. If the only way you will spend time with someone is if they do the things that make you happy, then you have a pet, not a person.

Many professional homeless workers are in horror at this concept. They believe that I am rewarding bad behavior and as long as I am not strict with what I will tolerate, then they will never change.

I have a different philosophy. As a follower of Jesus, I believe that I constantly let God down, yet he has not given up on me. I fail again and again, yet am loved completely and without question. And even should I decide to go my own way and make decisions that harm our relationship, he honors my choices and would take me back in an instant. In fact, he would never stop pursuing me in his efforts to take me back.

It’s called Grace. It’s called Love.

And if the cross on Friday and the empty tomb on Sunday have anything to teach us, it is that Love Wins.