Lessons learned amoung the homeless!

One of the greatest life shaping experiences I have ever had in my community was serving as a chaplain for Hope Ministries’ Bethel Rescue Mission. Bethel is a men’s rescue mission in down town Des Moines and is a faith based mission. In other words they do not take any government funding so that they can talk about Jesus. Ninety-five percent of their funding comes in the form of individual donors and five percent in the form of local business support. Not only was I introduced to a whole new cultural, one that is at times ignored by our society, but the experience changed my life forever as it changed the meaning of the phrase “the least of these.” I encountered horrific stories of child abuse, molestation, alcohol and drug abuse, all resonating from broken families. I still have nightmares today about some of the stories I heard. Although horrifying this experience shaped me to have compassion for the truly broken people in our society, as well as tolerance for those who are mentally or intellectually incapable of caring for themselves, let alone the children they have birthed. Five of the most tragic lives that I encountered and had a sever effect on me were the lives of “A,” “B,” “R,” “J,” and “JF.” I use only their first initials for confidentiality reasons.

“A” was one of the first men I encountered at the shelter. He was the third child and was unwanted. When he was two his parents tied him to a bed and fed him only beans, at six they committed him to a mental intuition where he was molested by a staff person. After committing some childhood crimes he was sent to a reform school where he was molested by a staff member. He escaped from this school at fourteen and sold his body on the street to homosexual men for food money. His parents let him move back home at sixteen where he had a sexual affair with his older sister and his little brother. A has been in and out of jail all his life. He is now fifty and cannot stay sober for one minute because he can’t face where he has been or what he has done, and is completely without the skills it takes to live in today’s society. Yesterday he called me and is in jail again for another alcohol related crime.

So, what do I do with this man? Through A God has showed me what it means to be a truly broken person. All that I though I knew about what these men needed went out the window when I heard his story. So, I asked A, “What can I do for you?” He answered, “Give me a hug.” So I held him for about fifteen minutes as he cried like a child. I wish I could say that this cry was cleansing and cured his ails but it didn’t. I learned that God sent me to the mission to change me not for me to change these men, as changing them fell under the category of miracle, a category that belongs to the Almighty. Dealing with A has shaped me to realize that I cannot save the world but I am called to do my part. My part is to see when the law, whether secular or God’s law, is crushing a man and bring him the message of comfort that comes through the revelation of Jesus Christ. Although God didn’t cure A, He was able to give him comfort and a promise to cling to through me. For fifteen minuets that day A was safe and let go of what has been building in him for years. For all I know this may have been the only fifteen minutes in his life where he has ever felt safe and loved. Those fifteen minutes gave A a reference point from which he could draw hope and security. He now knew that someone in the world loved him for who he really was, a broken child in a man’s body. He admitted to me on the phone that when he is in despair he remembers that moment. I do as well. I never really took time to consider the feelings of others; I only wanted them to know how their actions affected me. For the first time in my life I was thinking like a pastor, shepherding and loving my flock regardless of their wandering.

B is a handsome man of Native American descent. Alcohol is B’s poison but it is not his problem. For B alcohol is just a symptom of a deeper issue. B has an older sister who experimented with sex at the tender age of eleven. What good sister wouldn’t show her little brother what she had learned? At the age of seven B was having a full fledge sexual affair with his sister, not to mention interceding on behalf of his mother as his alcoholic father beat her. It’s no wonder that B is now a closet homosexual. He is searching for the loving father he never knew, he feels like his sister has stolen his innocence, and has given up on loving women because he couldn’t take the burden of not being able to protect his mother. He hates himself so he drinks to numb the pain which causing him to loose good jobs and rendering him homeless, broken, and hiding the only part himself that he feels is good. B, like A, is in need of a savior and has adopted alcohol as an escape.

This was my first contact with a closeted homosexual. Nothing I had learned in church about sexual immorality seemed like what he needed to hear. In fact B had heard it all already and it only made him despise himself the more. It is one thing to have a pious opinion on homosexuality and quite another to be responsible for delivering the Gospel promises of Jesus Christ to a person afflicted by this feeling. My experience with B shaped how I feel about gay people. Through B, God shaped me from an attitude of intolerance to an attitude of tolerance. You see this experience sent me to the scriptures where I found that sexual immorality is no greater a sin than drunkenness, adultery, or murder. Society puts sin into a hierarchy but God does not. Again I was reminded that my job wasn’t to tell B how to live his life or that he was a bad person. My job was to love him unconditionally and accept him as a child of God right where he was because being or not being gay wasn’t going to get him into heaven, faith was. I let go of my insecure homophobia and hugged B tight letting him know that Jesus and I loved him just the way he is, he doesn’t have to live up to some standard for God to love him because Jesus lived up to the standard for all of us. B found new comfort in the Bible and I had another part of my ignorant flesh put to death.

R is an interesting story. He has a BA in business from Syracuse University, which he earned while climbing the ranks of the IBM Corporation. The plague of addiction to alcohol, drugs, and homelessness do not discriminate; their victims come from all walks of life. R discovered that cocaine kept him alert longer which gave him more motivation to sell IBM products until his habit out weighed his income. He then tried to rob a liquor store, was caught, and spent seven years in jail for armed robbery. It is amazing to me how much drug use changes people. To meet R today you would never know that he had a violent bone in his body. And he doesn’t apart from the drugs. R is no longer a coke addict but alcohol has become his vice to escape the failure and embarrassment of his past. He has tried many recovery programs but they only help him stop drinking which is the symptom and don’t attack the problem his shame. Or maybe it’s R who can’t face his shame. Either way like the other men R is in need of a Savior.

My experience with R allowed me to see that I could be duped. There were times when I would swear that R believed in the promises of Jesus and wanted to deal with his past but each time I would get to close the next time I would see him he was drunk. I was humiliated several times when I went to bat for R with the staff and he would end up doing what they said he would, get drunk.
It was hard to love R unconditionally but I feel this was the lesson that I was to learn. God showed me that people will fail you constantly and you must love them any way. Jesus loves me every time I fail Him. Unconditional love doesn’t sprout in a person naturally; it is something that is endured and shaped over time. In these situations society has two different effects on people, either they become hardened and pessimistic, or they learn to love the person and not their actions. Through the grace of God I learned compassion and unconditional love.
J is another interesting story fraught with tragedy and joy. J is a U.S. Marine veteran of the Vietnam conflict. He was thrown in to a jungle at the age of eighteen, given a gun and told to kill or be killed. Not only that but that he was doing so, or as he was told, out of the love of his country. Imagine his confusion when he was spit on and called baby killer when he returned home. He had lost his sense of trust in everything he thought was good and right in the world and had gained a server hate for himself. He had met a girl in Phoenix and moved to Grinnell Iowa to live with her. In her home surroundings he found out that she had a multiple personality and was an intravenous drug user. Her dominate personality must not of like him because she kicked him out and he hitch hiked to Des Moines. A truck driver picked him up on I80 and drove him to the mission which he had no previous knowledge of. God must have a lot of angels that are truck drivers as this story is very common. J was sick and I feared he had pneumonia so I took him to the VA Hospital. The good news was that he didn’t have pneumonia; the bad news was that he had contracted the HIV virus from his girlfriend and it had developed into full blown AIDS. The doctors told him to go home and get his affairs in order he was going to die.

What do you tell a man with a death sentence? J was not a drug user or an alcoholic and he sure as hell didn’t deserve this. I love J very much and he became very close to my family and I. I held him as he cried for quit some time, it was all I could do to comfort him, I had no great words of advice. Through his tears he asked me to tell him about Jesus. What he wanted to know was if he was condemned to hell for murdering all those people in the war. He felt like a leper because no one would touch him. So, I showed him the love of Jesus by being sure to hug him each time I saw him and I even brought my then six month old daughter for him to hold.

Previously to meeting J I had thought that AIDS was a disease for gay men and drug users and it scared me. Through my experience with J I learned that in the darkest times of our lives comfort comes through love and God is love. There are no atheists in fox holes; surprisingly this whole world is one big fox hole. My fear of AIDS was gone, now I just hate that wicked disease.
J thought he was the only one of his brothers and sisters still alive, he was wrong. I found his older brother in a suburb of Chicago and when we contacted him he was in Des Moines to see J in less than five hours. He had been searching for J for quite some time. Through a miracle of God J’s body started to kill the HIV virus. His case was featured in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) and they are trying to duplicate his results as I write this paper. Within seven weeks J became well enough to travel to Illinois where he now lives with his brother. We still talk on the phone ever other week.

Jf is another interesting character and maybe the scariest. Jf is one of the biggest men I have ever seen standing six foot seven and weighing about two hundred sixty pounds. Jf is an ex-gang banger from Chicago and came to Des Moines under contracted to kill someone until he had a change of conscious. He came to the mission not knowing what to do with his new found sense of right and wrong which is where I met him. He wasn’t very fond of me, or any other white person for that matter, at first but little by little we found that we both possessed a similar interpretation of the Bible. I know it seems strange to believe that a gangster hit man was schooled in the Bible but the fact is that he was raised in a very Christian home. Jf disappeared for about two months after we started to get to know each other and when he resurfaced he showed up in my office a broken individual. He told me that he had returned to Chicago and had gotten back into drugs. The last two month had seemed like a blur but two days prior he came down from a meth induced high and had nothing in his pocket but a bus ticket to Des Moines and a rock that had “Jesus Rocks” inscribed on it. I had given him that rock months ago. He then shut the door to my office and asked me how to surrender to Jesus. I hooked Jf up with a recovery program and he is now working with at risk kids in Des Moines. Jf, the ever tough guy, never told me that he loved me but he did say that he would “kill a nigger for me,” which I think comes just as close in his heart.

Racial prejudice was a big thing in my up bringing. I was taught to think of black people as a lesser being. Not by my parents but by my peers. My experience with Jf changed all that. I know this unconditional loving and accepting thing seems to be a reoccurring theme here but that is exactly what it was, not just for me but Jf as well.

There were several men and women I had contact with that helped shape my life through my experience at Bethel: Ja, A, C, Ri, C, l, Am, T, J, K, P, E, the list goes on but this is a paper not a book.

As I reflect on the way God used my experience at Bethel to shape me I have identified three major themes; unconditional love, destruction of prejudice, and the unyoking of societal law.

Unconditional love, wow this was a lesson involved in every testimony I have to tell. Jesus loved everyone especially the lepers, the poor and the prostitutes. I encountered all three at the mission and found my heart broken for each of them. To truly ache for the needs of another person, I believe, is one of the most important lessons a Christian must learn.

The destruction of my prejudice against homosexuals and blacks still amazes me. I am surprised at how little I see color as a road block to unity and sexual preference as just another sin, no more, no less. The true spirit of Jesus unites people. I have preached in an entirely black, intercity church and felt more loved and at home than I do, sometimes, in my own congregation.

I am now free to love others as Jesus loves me. When Jesus said, “love others as I have loved you,” he wasn’t commanding anything. That would make Jesus just another law giver like Moses. Jesus didn’t come to make new laws; he came to fulfill the law so that we wouldn’t have to be held accountable for our adherence to the law. The law exists not for our salvation but to make us aware that we are sinners. When Jesus said, “love others as I have loved you,” He was showing as a faction of the freedom that belief in Him gives us. Now that we are saved by faith, we are free to love everyone and are unyoked from the burden of the stereotypes that society dictates. Now that I am not judged by the law I am free to follow it. This is the Gospel message.