Consider having to live on the street.
Can you even imagine the concrete being your pillow and the wind your blanket?
I can.
I know all too well.
The lowest point might be having to defecate outside and use the bushes for what Charmin toilet paper was purposed for. Or maybe being a woman experiencing homelessness is, in fact, the lowest once that time of the month comes and Mother Nature so rudely invades your body.
Except now, you are outside.
There is no bathroom.
There is no shower.
There is no private place to properly clean yourself.
It is degrading.
You begin to feel less than the gum underneath the bottom of someone’s shoe. They step on you. Keep walking. Grind you farther into the concrete without ever thinking about what is stuck beneath them.
You being the gum, metaphorically.
And society wonders.
Not I.
I have been here.
I understand.
They say, “That person looks like they’re on drugs. No wonder they’re homeless.”
Or, “Don’t give a homeless person money. They’ll just buy drugs with it.”
But consider that the person might have been like I was.
Maybe they held three degrees. Maybe they planned their life and career after university, and maybe those plans included law school.
Maybe they thought they had found “the one” only to discover how terribly wrong they were.
How about when two unbelievers meet and believe they are the ones for one another, but then one of them becomes a believer and finds God in a profound way?
What do you do when the person you chose before becoming who you are no longer fits the person you have become?
Trust me.
I know what the nonbeliever does not.
This is the crossroads.
A tale of two cities.
One road points toward salvation while the other points toward bondage.
I chose freedom.
But what happens when you learn that freedom is not really free?
You keep seeking.
To no avail.
Your reality remains ever present. It cannot be mistaken for luxury. It feels more like the pits of hell.
The darkness overtakes you in the wilderness.
Maybe you went on job interview after job interview only to hear, “You’re overqualified,” or, “You won’t be here long.”
Maybe you even revised your résumé. Took things off. Made yourself smaller on paper. Dimmed yourself down just enough to get through the door.
And still, the moment you opened your mouth in the interview, they could tell.
This woman won’t be here long.
Maybe you had savings and spent it all trying to bring generational restoration to the world.
Maybe you were trapped in a soul depleting custody case.
Maybe you simply lost everything you had because life just lifed.
And now you are lying on the street.
People come up to you asking how you ended up this way while all you are asking them to do is buy you a burrito from the Taco Bell right behind the both of you.
You are not asking for money.
You are asking for food.
And somehow, even hunger requires an interview.
How did you get here?
What happened to you?
Why are you homeless?
Are you on drugs?
As though your answer determines whether you deserve to eat.
Is the interview necessary so the person can feel better about themselves for doing a good deed?
I say just do the good deed.
What does it matter how the person ended up in the situation?
Feed them.
I say all of this because I have severe sympathy for the less fortunate.
There is a woman and a man, a couple rather, who have made an encampment near the gas station less than a block from my home. It is not lost upon me that on an otherwise ordinary street lies an encampment.
They have made that street corner their home.
People walk past them with disdain and contempt, as though there is some enormous distance between the person walking down the street and the person living on it.
There is not.
It could be you.
Easily.
All you have to do is marry the wrong person.
All you have to do is have a child with the wrong person.
All you have to do is lose the right job at the wrong time.
Spend what you saved trying to survive something you never planned for.
Have one crisis meet another crisis before you have recovered from the first.
Sometimes life does not collapse all at once.
Sometimes it takes one thing.
Then another.
Then another.
Until the concrete becomes your pillow and the wind becomes your blanket.
Christine Caine said in her 2024 sermon Journey to Joy that all you have to do for a marriage to fail is nothing.
Nothing.
Isn’t that trying?
And before people condemn those experiencing homelessness because they are using drugs or drinking, consider what it means to have nowhere to retreat from your own reality.
I never found myself at the bottom of hard narcotics. Marijuana always did me just fine.
But I understand why people who live on the street can begin to appear mentally ill. I understand why someone might talk to themselves. I understand why someone might drink themselves nearly to death.
Because there is a particular kind of pain in realizing that your home is the very street corner people hurry past.
You want to forget.
You want to forget that trash blows through your living room because your living room is the sidewalk.
You want to forget that people spit there.
That people throw things there.
That people walk there.
That someone spits out a piece of gum, another person steps on it, and shoe after shoe presses it deeper and deeper into the concrete.
Remember the gum?
You being the gum, metaphorically.
Except now you understand why I chose it.
Because after enough people have stepped on gum, nobody remembers what it looked like before it hit the ground.
They only see something dirty stuck to the street.
And sometimes that is what homelessness feels like.
People stop asking who you were before you got there.
Who you loved.
What you studied.
What you accomplished.
What you planned.
What you lost.
What happened.
Who you were before life pressed you into the concrete.
They simply see where you are now.
Living on the street.
Well, you know.
Not really living.
You are just existing.
And that brings me back to the crossroads.
A Tale of Two Cities.
Charles Dickens wrote of two cities. I found myself standing between two lives.
One road pointed toward bondage.
The other pointed toward salvation.
I chose salvation.
I chose freedom.
So if I chose the right road, why am I only existing and not living?
Why do I call the streets my home?
Why is the sky my window?
And if God says He will open “the windows of heaven” and pour down blessing, why am I lying beneath that very heaven wondering why I am so cold?
Malachi 3:10 (ESV)
Maybe that is the part of salvation we do not talk about enough.
Sometimes choosing freedom does not immediately change your surroundings.
Sometimes you leave bondage and still have to walk through the wilderness.
Sometimes you choose God and still sleep beneath the sky.
Sometimes the right road does not immediately look like the right road.
You can be free and still be cold.
You can be saved and still be homeless.
You can have faith and still wonder when the window will finally open.
And perhaps that is the difference between living and existing.
Existing asks, How did I end up here?
Living dares to believe that here is not where my story ends.
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