Several Sundays ago our pastor was talking about helping the poor.  He referred to those who complain about the poor taking advantage of the system and being lazy, and then he said, “If you think that most of the poor people are like that, you don’t know enough poor people.”  The statement stayed in my mind.  In order to make judgments on a group of people, whether it’s an economic group, racial group, religious group, or any other,   we have to know many people who fit into that group.  In research we call it a “sampling.”  To have validity, the sampling must be large enough to make assumptions about the group as a whole. 

The truth is, however, that we often come to conclusions about a group of people after observing only one or two people in that group.  I was listening to a conversation at a conference this weekend in which a lady was saying that when she was eight years old, she had gone to New York with her mother.  She had found a gift for her father and she had just enough money to buy the gift.  While she was waiting to pay, she dropped a quarter and a man stepped on the quarter and would not move.  She said that he said, “Welcome to New York, little girl!”  She said, “I know now that not all New Yorkers are like that man, but I still don’t like New York.”  When thinking of the poor and the homeless, we must often overcome the stereotypes that  have been created either by us or by someone else before we can decide what our response  should be to the “least of these.” I am now reading a new book by Silas House called Same Sun Here in which a girl from India living in New York is a pen pal to a boy from Eastern Kentucky.  He writes to the girl, “I have never met anybody from New York City before.  I’ve always heard that people from up there are real rude and will not hold the door for you, and you’ll get mugged if you walk down the street.  Is this true?  My mamaw says it is probably a stereotype, which I looked up in the dictionary and it means, ‘an oversimplified opinion.’”  Later in the book he says that some think that people from Eastern Kentucky are “stupid hillbillies.”  He is fortunate that he has adults around him who understand about stereotypes and he also experiences first-hand how making these kinds of judgments can hurt people. 

After getting to know many people who have economic problems, we generally realize that they are all different.  With some of them we sympathize  greatly, and with others we become impatient and want them to do their part to solve their problems.  In an earlier blog I mentioned that the best way to help people is to establish a relationship with them and learn what is really going on in their lives.  When we do this, we will be able to make wise decisions about how to help.  I remember when I was a teenager my mother volunteered to keep a fourteen-month old girl while her mother was in the hospital having her third child. My sister and I loved having the baby there.  We bought her some clothes and played with her almost like a doll.  After the mother went home from the hospital, days went by and they did not come to get the little girl. That suited my sister and me fine, but my mother said no.  She understood that we would all become very attached to the child. But my mother knew that eventually, when it suited them, the  parents would come for her.  So she packed her up and took her home to her family.  She made the right decision of course, but we were not old enough to understand what was needed in this situation.

I have observed that there are a few in every economic class of people who will take advantage of the system and will not work hard to do their part.  If they are in a family that has much money, they’ll take advantage of parents, brothers, and sisters.  If their family has limited resources, they may let co-workers or friends do their part or pay their way, and if they have none of these options, they’ll take what they can from the government with or without working for it.  However, in most cases, I think that people would rather work for what they get and they feel better about themselves when they do so.  When I talk to those who receive food at our “Meals and More” program, most of them seem extremely thankful to get the food and many of them would obviously rather be able to buy their own food.   Some of them are working and trying to make ends meet on what they make.  I often hear others talking about efforts they have made to find work or leads they have about jobs.  As far as any judgment that I could make about this segment of the population as a whole, I just don’t see that they’re that different from any other—except that they seem hungry enough to stand out in the rain and cold for a while to get a little bag with a few sandwiches in it.

I was reading a story today about a young girl who had posted a nasty letter about her parents on Facebook, and after finding it, her father posted a video response.  Obviously upset by both her criticism and her language, he read the letter she had written and responded to her allegations, then ended his response by shooting holes in her laptop computer with his pistol.  There were several responses to his video, some positive and some negative.  Two things were obvious to me as I listened to her letter and his response.  First, this was a family that had not been hit severely by the downturn in the economy; and second, in every segment of society there are people with what my husband calls “OPD”—Offensive Personality Disorder.  They say inappropriate things, they’re not grateful, they complain, they misuse what is given to them, they invade your space.  Poor people are no exception.  When you help the poor, it’s important to recognize this fact.  Not all of them will bow and thank you profusely for everything you do.  Some will, of course, but many will do something to offend. 

During conversations about helping the poor, I often hear people relating stories about their attempts to help someone  ending with some offensive behavior or language on the part of the person they tried to help.  Often it appears that the person’s desire to help the poor is diminished because the people they tried to help didn’t seem to appreciate it or they misused what was given them.  They just did not seem to deserve help.

This raises the question “How good do the poor have to be to deserve help?”

I tried to find some evidence in the Bible to help with that answer.  I read the passages where Jesus said to feed the hungry, but I couldn’t find any qualifications.  If a person is hungry, he needs food, period.  No offensive behavior changes that.  In fact, the stress of being hungry may actually make a person do or say things he/she otherwise might not do.  I have occasionally become irritated with the waitress because of the service when I was tired and hungry.  I would guess that’s also true of many of the poor we attempt to help, except I was probably an hour late for a meal, and they may be days late.  They are tired of being dependent upon others, tired of the stares, tired of the pity, tired of waiting in lines, tired of being told there is no job again today.  Then someone tries to help and they take out their frustration on the helper. 

Other issues regarding deserving help are how hard a person has tried to get work or how much he already has.  I often hear people talk about the fact that a person has a cell phone, he was brought to a soup kitchen in a nice car, he has a satellite dish in his yard, etc.  When we only know one thing about a person, it is often easy to make assumptions that are incorrect.  The best way to help people is to establish a relationship with them so that we can understand what real problems they may have, but if we are just giving out food we probably need to refrain from judgment on those we help.  They may look perfectly healthy to us because we can’t see the illness they have.  They may seem ungrateful and even angry at us, but we can’t see the condition of their hearts.

The fact is that fitting into our society is a major challenge for many of the poor in our country.  They just don’t have what it takes to succeed materially or socially.  But that does not mean they don’t deserve help.  Maybe the help they need is learning how to navigate in their society, or maybe it’s just a meal, but we should be careful of setting up artificial standards for them to meet in order to be worthy of our help.

Last week I talked about the homeless in terms of housing and having a place to stay.  However, one of the saddest things about being homeless has little to do with having a place to sleep.  Home means so much more than shelter.  Robert Frost, in “The Death of the Hired Man,” said that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  The poem is about a man who is similar to many people who find themselves homeless.  Warren and Mary are not relatives, but they have to take him in.   Silas is “…just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.”   There are many definitions of home, but this poem seems to illustrate the concept more than any other explanation I’ve heard.   Silas was a day laborer who worked for Warren during the off seasons, but during the busy season, he would be lured off with higher pay.  Somehow he knew that Warren and Mary would always take him back when times got bad.  He went to them, rather than to his successful brother down the road.

 Many  of us have had a place where we felt safe, sheltered, and loved at some time in our lives.  Often it is attached to a small, but comfortable space somewhere in the past.  My own childhood home was in a small rural area of Southeastern Kentucky.   We (my mother, father, sister and I) moved there when I was about three or four years old. At that time it was a four-room frame house.  It  faced a dirt road out in the country, mostly surrounded by woods.  My sister and I had no fear of the woods around our house, so we built playhouses with fallen limbs for walls, green moss  for covering furniture, and wild flowers for decorations.  Occasionally something might scare us, like the time our older city cousin visited and told us there were wild hogs out there and ran back toward the house, causing us to run frantically after her.  But most of the time it never occurred to us to worry about any harm because we were close to a safe place called home.  Our safety was assured by our mom and dad, as was our well-being in all ways.  We had few material things in those days, but we were loved and that was most important.  It still is.  The house, although it was remodeled and increased in size when I was a teenager, continued to be a modest house with a few more conveniences throughout much of my adulthood.  After my parents died, my sister and I kept it for about ten years, renting it out to a nice couple.  Eventually we decided that we needed to sell it after we realized that neither of us would ever go back there to live.  Although I’m a bit sad when I pass by it, I am fortunate that my current home also provides that same feeling of love and safety that my childhood home did. 

The truth is that if people become homeless, they almost certainly have no place that feels like a home, so they are missing much more than just a place to sleep at night.  Relatives and friends have all given up on them, and just as poor Silas had, they often have “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.” 

One of the things the Davies Shelters have tried to do for the men and women who are guests there is to help them develop some sense of home and family by encouraging them to help one another and work together to provide a well-kept house, find employment, and eventually make other living arrangements.  This is a way to help them fill the void in their lives when they arrive.  Providing food and shelter is important but it does not necessarily give a person a feeling of home.  This is done through shared work, laughter, tears, and mutual stories of accomplishment.  On many occasions when I’ve visited the shelter,  I’ve heard stories of guests who have helped one another through difficult circumstances, defended one another, and  returned to the shelter after leaving to volunteer their time to help other guests.  If homeless people are to recover their sense of home, they need more than just food and a place to sleep.

In small towns and rural areas, it is not unusual to see homes in one community that reflect a wide range of economic successes.  A huge brick or stone house may sit on a large piece of well-kept property adjoining a small run-down shack or mobile home on a small overgrown plot of land.    People in those homes often go to church together, shop in the same local grocery store, and sometimes work in their gardens alongside one another.  Most of the time they know each other pretty well.  So most of the people who have done really well know some who haven’t and often know why they have not done so well. 

In more heavily populated urban areas, there are whole communities where houses look very much alike, or at least they look like they have cost about the same.  In these areas, we often buy our homes, not because they are convenient to our workplace, but because they are in a neighborhood that fits our ability to pay.  So most of the people in our neighborhoods are of a similar social status as we are.  Someone once said that in terms of the value of your house, the “best place to live is in the least expensive house on the more expensive street.”  So what we often do is to look in a neighborhood just beyond our means and hope that the price of one of the houses has been lowered to a price we can afford!  Because the houses are generally grouped according to price, we see whole neighborhoods that look really good and those that look really run-down.  We talk to new people who are seeking houses about “good neighborhoods” and “bad neighborhoods.” 

This brings us to the question of what impact our residence has on our worth .  How stable does my home have to be for my life to be of worth?  On a scale beginning with a mansion and going downward to being homeless, at what point exactly does where we live mean that we are less important?  At the top, we have home owners-- mansions, large homes, medium and small homes. Then we have mobile homes.  One well-known author says that as a child he was playing on the lawn in front of the mobile home his family owned when some people drove by and yelled “trailer trash” at him and his brother.  He said that those people didn’t care that the lawn was neat, the home was clean, and his family worked hard to have a comfortable place to live.  They just looked at the fact that their home was a mobile home.  As a successful writer, he has never forgotten the hurt it caused him.  Now let’s look at other living options.   In addition to owning homes people may choose to rent houses, apartments, or condos, and pay a monthly fee.  Like homes that are purchased, these may be very expensive and on a par with some of the above, or may be located in “undesirable” neighborhoods.  When people are unable to either own or rent a place to live, they may be forced to move in with family or friends.  If that is not an option, they may live in their vehicle for a while, or if they can afford it, stay in a motel.  When that fails, they seek a shelter where other people without a home stay, or they are forced to stay outside, under a bridge maybe, or sleep on a park bench. One reason some people do not seek shelter at all is that it demands that they admit they are homeless. 

From the viewpoint of our society, the best place to be is at the top—living in a huge mansion or house that is well-furnished and well-stocked with food, beverages, and all the modern conveniences.  But living that way often costs us.  If we look behind those fancy curtains we may see tears and anguish, broken relationships, and dashed hopes.  So the fact that we have our mansion doesn’t necessarily make us happy; it just makes us look better to other people.  On the other hand, the worst thing to be in our society is homeless.  When you have no place to live, you are nothing except homeless.  People fear you, the police suspect you, and the people who try to help pity you.  But nobody respects you for who you are.  You may be gifted, intelligent, caring, and competent, but people generally don’t see you in any of those ways when you’re homeless.

I’ve been talking about how our society is, not whether that’s a good or bad thing.  We place great value on the ability to own a nice home.  It’s not just something  the rich value.  It’s the American way.  It’s really not enough just to have shelter.  We want to have more than just a warm, comfortable place to sleep.   It is almost impossible for us to think outside this paradigm.  Who wouldn’t want to live in a nice, well-kept home in a beautiful neighborhood?  I don’t know anyone, do you?  But what if we valued something else?  What if, for example, the most important thing was to be generous?  What if we judged ourselves and were judged according to how willing we were to give up what we had for someone else’s benefit? Or what if we valued hospitality above all else?  What if our worth was tied to how hospitable we were to strangers?  In the future we will look at some cultures where home ownership is not as important as it is to us. 

“Where do you live?”  That’s a simple enough question.  It’s one we often use at social gatherings where we’re just getting to know people.  The response may be something like, “Oh, I live out near Cave Spring” or “I live on Mt. Alto” or some other such statement.  But what if the person you ask  is homeless?  You’re probably thinking, “Those kind of people wouldn’t be at the kind of parties I attend.”  And you may be right.  But the fact is that people who may be homeless now may well have been at your social gatherings in the past, because they weren’t always homeless.

On our last trip to Kentucky I had my note pad out and was trying to get my ideas together for a blog about homelessness.  I looked up and saw a sign over the road that said  “Entering Fog Advisory Area.”  I thought the sign was an appropriate one for what I was feeling as I contemplated writing about homelessness.  You might think that since I am married to a man who has his name on a homeless shelter( and who spends most of his time trying to help hungry and homeless people) that I would have very well-defined ideas about the homeless and could crank out volumes of material about the subject.  But that is not the case.  I struggle with what is the most helpful way to talk about this subject because the fact is that homelessness includes a vast array of problems, a wide assortment of people, and multiple attempts to solve the problems. 

As I tried to list ideas to write about, I realized that my thoughts were mostly along the line of how we view the homeless, and my mind always goes back to a brief scenario a few years ago.  Bill and I were driving down Second Avenue.  When we got to the red light at Broad Street, he rolled his window down and spoke to a scraggly-looking man walking down the street (not an uncommon occurrence).  They talked a minute until the light changed and we drove on.

“Who was that?” I asked.                                                                       

“Oh, I used to know his dad, who worked at------.  He had some trouble, got into drugs or something, lived outside a while, stayed at the shelter a while, ---------and you know, he’s just a friend of mine.”  Bill always seems to see more than just “a homeless man.”  He views homeless people in the same way he views people in other segments of society.  Most of us have trouble getting past the “homeless” part.

In our society being homeless means much more than simply not having  a place to sleep.   In my next blog, I will plunge into the fog to explore some of the issues related to not having a permanent residence.  My goal is to clarify my own thinking about the subject as much as to challenge readers to understand what it means not to have a home in a society where the worth of a person is often tied up with home ownership.

I invite you to join me each week as I attempt to challenge our thinking about different aspects of homelessness.