Our ministry building is located off of a busy street one block away from the oldest and largest housing projects in our county, where there are 181 kids between kindergarten and fifth grade. We are flanked on the other side by an extended stay motel where 138 rooms are mostly reserved for folks who actually live there.
Homelessness is not a new phenomena to me. I was a homeless child.
But what has been new to me is where homeless people live.
When I moved to Atlanta I had no idea that people lived in extended stay motels. I had never driven on a dirt road to pick up kids for the corps in really sad trailer parks. Coming from the north where there is plenty of blight to go around, I was sheltered from some of this and these were new experiences.
Since then the LORD has birthed in me a passion for reaching out to people specifically in extended stay motels. They seem to be largely forgotten. People think of the "old drunks" under the bridges, or in the woods, or the "poor people" in the housing projects, but other faces of homelessness are largely forgotten--folks who couch surf and rotate around to family members with no permanency. People who are transient as they hop from one relationship to the next searching for a place of true belonging. We don't think of them because we choose not to see them.
A couple of weeks ago I was leaving our shelter during dinner time and as I turned out of the parking lot a young lady was singing as she was pushing a luggage cart from the extended stay across the road from us. It was loaded with the majority, if not all, of her belongings. With her (although not seen at first) was a little boy with magnificent bouncing curls about 18-24 months old helping his mama push that cart.
I was blessed in that moment. I'm sensing the money ran out to stay at the hotel across the road and they were coming to seek shelter at The Salvation Army, just a stones throw away. The "Center of Hope," a beacon for those who need it.
This morning as I left the gym I saw a school bus at a different extended stay on Church Street picking up kids to take them to school which I have seen countless times before at the hotel across the road from our offices.
I'm not sure if it is a cultural thing, or a humanity thing, but we don't want to "deal" with what we don't see. We have the luxury of not touching it or smelling it if we don't want to. Other people live--survive--in a state of chronic homelessness. It is all they know just as you may only know comfort and having a home. We have the comfort of our structured church committees with like-minded Christian friends only-- and benevolence funds-- while they have open air and true faith that God will provide.
Please open your eyes to what is around you. Let God use you.
"Let us become more aware of your presence..." as the Jesus Culture lyrics remind us and as scripture says in Titus 3:5, "He saved us, not because of righteous acts we had done, but because of his mercy..."
