Finding the Opportunities for Success

Working with unsheltered men, women and children provides many opportunities for despair. Very few people become homeless for a single, easily correctable reason. Homelessness is usually the result of a chain of multiple events, some of which could have been averted, and some not.

For instance, I once worked with a teenage girl who had been physically abused by her father since early childhood, and was desperate for a way out of her home. She was of about average intelligence, but years of abuse had robbed her of focus, concentration and concern about her education. When an older man offered to let her have the spare bedroom in his apartment, she leaped at the chance.

It turned out that she had moved in with her father's clone. Within a month, she was pregnant, and within three months she had dropped out of school. By the time she was 19, she was a mother of two small children. She had no parental support, no high school degree, no job experience, and no marketable skills. Her options were limited to submitting to physical abuse, or living on the streets with an infant and toddler. She chose homelessness when her partner began abusing the children.

If there was ever a happy ending to that story, I don't know it. I tried every possible resource I knew, and came up empty. I was able to cobble together a few nights at a cheap hotel, courtesy of a church, but couldn't make it sustainable. I couldn't find emergency child care, or a job, or affordable housing, or funds for deposits. One day I went to the hotel, and she wasn't there.

That was my first experience with a homeless family, but it wasn't my last. Each family comes with a host of problems: mental illness, sexual abuse, lack of education, children born to children, generational poverty, medical needs (lots of childhood asthma). It's easy to start thinking that there is no hope for anyone.

Except, that there is.

I was reminded of this last winter, when COPE Center in Walton County took in a couple who had been homeless for over a year. COPE was receiving funds through the Okaloosa Walton Homeless Continuum of Care/ Opportunity, Inc., which we in turn had received through the state. Since I was monitoring expenditures, I was well aware of all the money being poured into aid for this couple. There were motel bills, restaurant vouchers, prescription medication, doctor's visits. Pretty soon the 7th Day Adventist Church and the Mental Health Association of Okaloosa and Walton Counties were all pitching in.

I did not approve. I kept saying, "What are we achieving? When this money finally disappears, this couple is going to be back on the streets." Charity Parker, who assisted Carolyn Hammond in working with this couple at COPE Center, told me to share her faith. This couple was going to make it.

On the day COPE discharged this couple from their oversight, the husband got his trucker's license and a job driving a rig. He and his wife hopped in the cab of the truck, and drove off. Today, the two of them are doing very well. His wife is well on her way to a trucker's license, and they have driven 18-wheelers all over the country. They drop off postcards every so often to let us know where they are, and what they are doing. Sometimes they send envelopes, with money sent to the church so that other homeless people can get a hand up.

There is enormous joy in working with the homeless, because you never know where a miracle is waiting to happen. Over the years I have seen children reunited with parents, fathers reunited with sons. I have watched as individuals have gotten sober and families have established homes. Some of our most prominent citizens have been homeless at one time in their lives, and some of them even consider themselves spiritually richer for the experience.

This blog will be dedicated to the miracles of healing, both for the homeless, and for the volunteers who work with them. Sometimes I will be exploring challenges for which solutions are still waiting to be discovered; sometimes I will be relating successful approaches other towns have used to help homeless people transition to self-sufficiency. But no matter what, I will be sharing the faith of all those who work with the least of these, our brethren - that everyone deserves an opportunity to make a better life.