3 years of love in a bag

You’ll see him coming with a bit of a hobble. He’ll kiss you on the cheek with his fuzzy, booze-smelling beard while saying "It’s ok, because I'm Italian!"

He could be my grandfather. He served his country well, but doesn’t want to leave the camping –or the ganja—that he knew in the field. He’s Marcus and he’s the reason I come out on a cold night with blankets. He cries because we found his family and they sent us a picture of a granddaughter he has never met. He doesn’t know it now, but in four months he will meet her, with the help of the bus ticket we got him for his birthday.

Ian is here too. Ian is a kind and gentle man abused by others on the street; his body, bent and broken, is in a battle it will lose to epilepsy. His eyes look up at me, but his face is forever aimed at the floor. Once a renowned DJ in Great Britain, he now empties trash downtown at midnight, his wages covering little more than the bus ticket it takes to get there. Ian is often intimidated into giving much of his paycheck to other homeless men. Not once will Ian or his employer complain about the roughly third of Ian’s life he spends in the hospital from his many seizures. Almost every week as we gather around the tree at the gas station where we meet, Ian leads us in The Lord’s Prayer, his frail voice ringing strong and true.

Joey’s around the corner and the bruise he gave me last week is hidden under a long sleeve shirt. He’s the reason Marcus can’t get off the ganja.

Jason is not here today, but he will be back. He'll forget to take his meds, his depression will get out of control, and his drinking will drive him to the streets. We've already helped him get back on his medication four times; we expect to do it again.

Karl’s gone too and we couldn’t be happier, as he finally let us take him to rehab. We knew Karl for a year and a half before we earned the right to know the truth: “I have a home,” he said with eyes so filled with shame and tears that he couldn't look at us, “I am dying of cancer, and I won't let my children watch me waste away.” His voice cracks as he whimpers out “like... the way I...” his hands and voice in competition to see which could shake more violently, “...watched... my father.”

Maybe rehab will help with the drinking, but it can't cure the cancer.

Colleen may not know what’s going on all the time, but she’ll call you “honeybunch” and tell you about the time we took her to the movies. She confides with Chloe, a high school girl who is a natural at this strange thing we call relational ministry, about how she survives on the streets by engaging in prostitution. She loves Chloe more so, I think, than I have ever seen anyone love another person.

Douglas is gone too. But the artwork he gave us survived, and so has the tree we planted for his memorial. On the side of a dirty road in front of a dumpster outside of a gas station sits the struggling tree, reminding us of the prayers we say for him and each other, and how God cares so deeply about the people who would not normally have funerals, who pass out the newspapers but whose passing won’t be mentioned in them, whose only work is on a graveyard shift but won’t be put in any grave.

Patrick and Jerry are about too, but they are different now. They once used to be the friends that we would visit, but now they are off the streets, and the love they feel for their friends who are still sleeping outside drives them back again, far more than just on the days we go together.

Jonathon, a man with a stiff body but warm heart, who was crippled early in life with Polio and spent years in a wheelchair, is here too and tonight he will share a song with us when we gather to sing, talk, share, and pray. He asks us to write it down because he does not know how. We do. (It is on the top right.)

We're lovebaggers (www.lovebags.org), and we were named for the ziplock sacks we fill with food, water, socks, and anything else the homeless might need. We’re not an organization; we have no structure for which we could put anyone on staff. We don’t get paid to do this; we all (or at least, most of us, in this economy) have real jobs. Our many groups in cities across the nation and the world often look very different, but we are united under one mission: to embrace those living in the abandoned places of the empire, to love the people no one else seems to want. And so we walk the streets, seeking out the homeless like long lost friends -- surprised and delighted to find that they are.

We are named after a ziplock bag filled with stuff, but the lovebag is just an introduction – a handshake, if you will. What our homeless friends need -- and what I think what we give them -- isn't a handout, but rather the chance to be a human again. We are not a feeding program; we are not an outreach from a church; we don't measure our results in conversions, numbers fed, or the number of people we get into rehab. We just try to love people furiously and create community in a place where the life, love, and beauty of true friendship often does not reach. This is the defining core of what out little troupes do – we don’t end homelessness – the homeless, themselves, do that -- we just give a few people back some shard of their humanity.

***

My name is Matthew and I penned these words about a year and a half ago to explain lovebags for a Christian magazine. I recently moved to Asheville, North Carolina, but while visiting Fort Lauderdale, I paused to reflect upon these words again. Much of that reflection focused on Karl and what he meant to me.

Shortly after writing this, Karl was killed in a car accident. He now is remembered, missed, prayed for, and represented by a small pile of rocks and a shrub at an indiscreet tree, next to a dumpster, in the parking lot of the abandon dinner next to the the gas station where Jesus lives.

The reflections, did not end with just Karl. I didn't know it yet, as I sat on a curb with my friends on the warm Florida nights that inspired stories like this, but lovebags will alter the course of my life. I'll meet a lot of really cool and caring volunteers. I will gain two new roommates and and two of my best friends I have ever known when I ask two grown men to take their first step from living outside to inside via my living room. My life will be forever defined by these late night conversations in the woods near the freeway with Karl, by my little dates with Colleen, and most of all by the deep and mutually beneficial friendships with Jerry and Patrick. Maybe it’s all the things they share in common with my Savior, who was also homeless, bent and broken, and without a grave, but we can’t help but feel that my homeless friends have somehow added so much perspective and value to my life that I owe a very large percentage of who I am to them.

Knowing Colleen has given us a beautiful gift; she has allowed so many of us to hear the gospels again for the first time. When we took Colleen to see a Christmas play at a local megachurch, they enacted the scene where Jesus forgives the prostitute caught in adultery. Hearing Colleen sob at the enacting of that story, a story that so represented her life, showed us the unbelievable power of the gospel and revealed to us, in such a new and deeply personal way, the beauty of a love that leaves no sin unforgivable. She allowed us to see that story come to life. Her tears of joy at the wonder of a God who can forgive what she had done -- when she never thought that possible -- has taught us more than any book or sermon ever has about the unrequited love of God.

Karl and Ian show us that sometimes our wounds are there to heal others. Both their stories cannot end well, but they heal through their many wounds and it was their requests for a prayer circle that is the reason that we hold hands in a circle and all take turns speaking, singing, and praying. They brought their faith to that street corner; they planted a church -- not us.

Jason’s depression reveals my depression. Every person is at times lost and confused. We may hide it with our respectable careers and professional language, but the truth is Jason is one of the few people I feel comfortable talking about my own questions and difficulties. No one has any real idea what’s going on in this life -- homed or homeless -- we’re all going through it for the first time. I might own a business and live in a home, but Jason and I are woven together into the same tapestry. Clumsy, confused, dependent, crippled -- but somehow making it through by supporting each together.

But it is the late night conversations with Karl in the bushes and living with Jerry and Patrick, that has remade me the most. They have taught me a new way to relate to others and have showed me how to ask a good question. Questions that enter into the essence of a person, not just the status questions I love to ask. "Where do you work?," "What neighborhood do you live in?," "What do you do?", -- any of these normal questions, don't have any answers. My homeless friends have taught me to ask about a stranger’s favorite story, their fondest memory, the one thing in the world that they would change, what makes the happiest or angriest, or what they really think is beautiful in the world. My homeless friends have taught me, a somewhat introverted person, more about the art, joy, and beauty of conversation than anyone else I have ever met.

Knowing the homeless (and just as important letting them know you in return) will remake your life. It will alter your thought process, change the way that you think about your finances and your spare bedrooms, and restore more joy to your life than you would ever think possible.

I hope that reading this might promote you to wander the streets, looking as we do, for the long lost brother you don’t have -- yet. Sharing a meal and your life with him, with the help of a bag filled with love.

Matthew

*Many times a homeless friend we have known simply disappears, sometimes you learn that they died and sometime you never know what happened at all. We often pray for them in our circle. The names of the disappeared have been changed. Colleen, Patrick, Gerry, Marcus, and Karl (who only authorized the first half, obviously) have requested that their names not be changed in this story. They want they lives shared.