Failure of Courage?
I was hanging in the wonderful city of Toronto this week.
I really don’t like city life, although this trip I have it real easy: no kids, free meals, an ultra-modern hotel with wireless and a real fountain in my room!
It seems such a paradox though… I just get done spending some big corporate bucks on a sweet steak dinner and decided to have a walk. I hadn’t walked 2 city blocks and walked by 5 homeless humans sleeping on sewer vents. A particularly disturbing scene was a young woman with down syndrome that was sprawled out (like you can do in a bed), but this was just on the sidewalk and the vent was just keeping her back warm.
The images of sleeping homeless just stayed in my thoughts during the trip. I just don’t know what to do… It feels like a cop-out – to see such a need and feel like I can’t do anything because I’d be enabling them, or couldn’t trust them to handle cash for their lasting benefit.
A crazy idea came over me… invite them into my hotel room, I had more than enough space for them… what happens whey they jack my company’s property (cell/computer)? So I bailed on the homeless need in Toronto.
It doesn’t seem like a calling to go rescue the homeless, 
yet the need was very problematic on my heart. Perhaps I should leave the cushy corporate job to figure out how God can finance my family while I truly help the needy? That seems like the courageous, faith-filled life I’m supposed leading.
I dunno… the next time a needy person asks me for money, I have an idea I’m gonna try though: offer them to buy them a meal at the nearest McDonald’s.
What do you think you suburbanites?
Author: Brett Veenstra | Category: Disciple | Comments(3) January 2006
Perhaps this is an experience for you to know without question how blest you really are.<br/><br/>And as you pass through your life, you will have an even greater sense of purpose…to help the organizaitons that help the homeless. That’s a doable thing.<br/><br/>There are homeless everywhere…and hurting people inside homes. Just open your heart. Ask the Lord to show you..to see people as HE sees them and then to show you what He wants you to do.<br/><br/>You may be surprised at how easy the answer might be. Perhaps a Boy Scout troop’s activity might be to collect and pass out blankets, or food, or help in a shelter.<br/><br/>Or maybe one summer day, you and your 5 can go pick up cans to collect $$ for giving to a homeless shelter.<br/><br/>The Salvation Army does this kind of work. Investigate. It doesn’t have to be in giving thousands of dollars.<br/><br/>But volunteers are needed — always in America.<br/><br/>Find your niche’. It’s waiting for you.<br/><br/>But FIRST and always take care of family — all of your family.
Thanks for the comment. There’s just something that strikes me as odd about your last line though… perhaps it was in reaction to my thought to leaving a cushy job to go and help others…<br/><br/>People do that all the time and my perception is that life is clearer, simpler, and more meaningful. Sometimes as I listen to the things my kids have picked up from our abundant home, I’m not so sure that I’m taking the best “care” of them.<br/><br/>Anywho, back to the point of helping others and not concentrating on my self-interests (including family — all of my family)…<br/><br/>I was having lunch this week with two guys who felt it was the government’s responsibility to take care of the poor.<br/><br/>I completely disagreed, and to your point about homeless everywhere – it should be the mission of Christians to care for those without a family or home. It would also make sense that each church would have some group of folks that:<br/>a) knew of the need<br/>b) knew how to match the need<br/>c) knew how to rehabilate<br/><br/>There I go again, back to consumer Christianity – if I could just have a church figure out all this stuff, plan it and I just show up, life would be so much more easier and a clearer conscious I’d have.
i love the city… at least i think i do. Despite a few pockets of urban and semi-urban living i’ve spent the majority of my life as a suburbanite.<br/><br/>I keep thinking that if i moved into a city that i might develop some greater awareness or compassion for people in need, but i’m not sure that would happen either, i see a lot of people who live in cities developing a new sense of blindness when it comes to those sleeping on sewer-vents. <br/><br/>Maybe they’ve tried to help and have gotten burned or maybe self-centeredness is just really THAT difficult (read: impossible) to break out of.<br/><br/>Time is definitely a factor in all of this. To really help, even if it’s buying a mcdonalds meal, takes time. I’m not shirking my own culpability here but i understand why parts of the bible hypes singleness. To care for the homeless while neglecting my family would be sin. To offer some “token” help to the needy might just be self-deception and ego-building… but maybe if i didn’t live out here in my little vinyl-sidded bubble i’d be easier or clearer…<br/><br/>i keep reading about these lofts in detroit that they are hoping lots of people buy… is that a step in the right direction? if so does anyone want to come? or is that creating a slightly-less-suburban suburbia… <br/><br/>maybe i put too much into space, proximity, but i can’t help thinking that the first step would be to walk with/nearer some of these people. It seems like that would be the incarnational thing to do.