A downtown business owner texted in a panic after encountering a young girl sleeping in a car near her shop.
“I could not drive away without checking on her and introducing myself,” she wrote. “I just needed to tell you about her because I know its gonna start to get cold soon.”
She proceeded to tell me the girl’s name and some of the things she had learned about her. I knew her, and I was able to assure the shop owner that help was in motion.
Days later, while I was visiting the woman’s shop as a customer, she struck up a conversation with me about her experience.
“Does it ever go away?” she asked. “That feeling like you want to do something but don’t know how to help.”
If I am totally honest, I still have nightmares about homeless people after all these years. I worry about them like they are family. I can hardly have a conversation with one of them without imagining a scenario where they wouldn’t have to sleep outside.
When my children were young, I would pop them in the stroller at bedtime and walk the downtown loop, where many of our neighbors bed down for the night. I often found it was a more peaceful time of the day to check in on people and connect with them as humans.
At times I have joked, it was my way of tucking the family in for the night. Secretly, it also quelled my anxieties about who was sleeping where and what people needed.
These days, I’m pulled in too many directions to maintain the habit; and, frankly, I’m tired. But on nights that my mind can’t settle down or in the early morning hours when I can’t go back to sleep, I still slip out for a long walk through our city.
To further confess, my social/emotional location feels so broken sometimes that I struggle to relate to mainstream settings. I cannot attend a holiday party without wondering what it would be to invest that glitz and glam and very heavy hor d’oeurves into solutions that get people off the street. I have a hard time sitting in church on Sunday without imagining the many ways those gigantic buildings could be useful to community needs. As my children watch the Christmas parade, I’m busy wondering what it would be for our current and formerly unhoused neighbors to have the opportunity to build a float.
Does it ever go away? Not really. It gets worse the more the names and stories of neighbors on the street begin to mean something to you.
But I cannot imagine it another way.
For a long time, I thought that everyone saw what I saw. The wounded beggar named Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) was suffering terribly in the heart of our city. He longed for the simple crumbs that would fuel his survival. Where it haunted me how much he blended into the scenery, he was haunted by how much other people wanted him to go away.
Oh, how deep the chasm between the well-to-do and the not doing too well.
An invisible line in the sand has created an entire “caste” system of those who “deserve” to be seen and those who can be discarded. The more elderly, the more differently-abled, the more affected by trauma a neighbor is, the less use society has for them.
Yet, the chasm is so apparent to those who live on the invisible end of it, that even the thought of crossing brings about debilitating paralysis.
In Luke’s parable, the rich man acknowledges the gravity of the situation only when he switches places with Lazarus in death. Condemned to torment, he experiences the immobility that Lazarus knew in life for the very first time.
He summons for Lazarus to quench his thirst. His influence is gone.
Not even the wealth he had in life can buy his freedom to cross the chasm in death.
The rich man begs Abraham to send warning to his family. But power means nothing in death if God’s story means nothing to those who are living.
Does it ever go away? Well, if it does, we have lost our humanity.
The shop owner kept me apprised of her connections with the young woman in her car throughout the coming days.
“I gave her my card, some cash, and told her to come get her hair washed at the shop sometime,” she said. “I hope someone can do something to help her. Is there something I can do?”
She already had.
She noticed Lazarus at the gate and called her by name. And in that moment, the chasm between us all got that much smaller.
– Meghann Cotter
Executive Servant-Leader