A "Pitts" Stop in the Steel City
SATURDAY NIGHT'S ALL RIGHT WITH ME...
esus Christ loves you very
much," the person on the phone answered. I
responded, "Can you tell me if you have any beds
open tonight ?". "Hold on," I was told.
Another voice came on the telephone. "Can I help you
?" He asked. I repeated myself again,"Can you
tell me if you have any beds open tonight"? "If
you wanted a bed," the man told me, "you should
have been here at 6:00 p.m. You're not likely to get a
bed at this hour. Call the Pleasant Valley shelter. They
don't open until 7:30."
I
called the Pleasant Valley shelter and asked, "Can
you tell me if you have any beds available?" "I
don't know," the man responded,"it's not 7:30,
we won't know until after 7:30." "What time can
someone stay to in the morning?" I asked.
"8:00," the man answered. "Where do the
folks go at 8:00?" I inquired. "I don't
know," the man said," I guess home or some
place." "They go home?" I repeated. There
was a long silence."I don't know," he said,
"they go somewhere." I then apologized for
troubling the man. It was obvious by his tone that my
phone call was an intrusion into his day. I thanked him
for his time and said goodbye. So began my fifth journey
to the subculture of streets. This time it was the city
of Pittsburgh PA.
Each
year I go to to live with homeless people because I have
realized that, although I have been working with the
homeless for 13 years now, I too can become insulated to
the reality of the pain, uncertainty, and fear that
homeless people feel. I have come to see in myself this
tendency to be insulated as a result of being
comfortable. As a result of continued insulation, I (like
others ) become out of touch. The consequence of being
out of touch is to lose perspective. 
The end
result of this loss of perspective is what Isaiah in
chapter 58:9 calls "the pointing of the
finger". I go to live with homeless people to regain
perspective, have my compassion renewed and my reservoir
of compassion replenished! In short, I go for a reality
check.
As a
Christian, I believe that since Christ incarnated himself
into "our world" in order to be a bridge for
men and women to have a relationship with their maker, we
too then, must find ways, for the same reason, to
incarnate ourselves into the world of those whom we care
about; those whom God has called us to reach out to. We
must enter into their world so that we can understand
their world view and presuppositions; how they think
which results in how they feel. This is essential if we
hope to bring them the good news of new life in Jesus
Christ. This I believe is the true meaning of Christmas.
I believe that in order to fully understand the world
view of the homeless, we must first "feel or suffer
with them" on some level so that we can identify
with them in their pain in much the same way Jesus
identified with us. It is through this identification
with those who are hurting that we discover a new sense
of compassion. This compassion results from our
understanding that their needs, although defined
differently from ours, are at the most basic level much
the same. We can not learn to love our neighbor until we
first see our neighbor as fellow human being, created in
the image of God but marred by sin and broken. And it is
not until we can connect to our own brokenness that we
can truly help others recover from theirs. My first goal
in going to the streets is ultimately very simple: to
learn how I can grow in love for my neighbor and create
structures and opportunities for others to do the same.
