Someone Cares

Someone Cares

One guest was waiting outside the gate Tuesday morning when I arrived to start the coffee.  “Elijah” had on his insulated orange jump suit that he’s been wearing all winter.  It is a bit tattered and quite dirty now, but still keeping him warm.  

I said “Good morning,” and he moved from the gate so I could unlock it.  But he said nothing.

            “How are you doing?” I asked.  But he said nothing.

            “It is a little warmer this morning,” I observed as we walked into the front yard together.  But he said nothing.

            I wasn’t surprised.  Elijah rarely says anything.  When he does speak, it is rarely coherent.  Underneath the orange jump suit, the disheveled hair, and the intensely vacant eyes, I know there is someone.  But I don’t know who he is, even after nearly eight years of his coming to Manna House as a guest.

            Yet, he comes, and I do too, and we’re together here on the mornings Manna House is open, and I guess that’s something for both of us.  Still, I yearn for more, for him to be housed, to be in a good state of mind, and for us to be able to talk freely.

            Later, as I sit in the kitchen listening to the coffee percolate, I see another guest walking up Jefferson from Claybrook.  “Laura” is wrapped in a blanket and she holds several bags.  She could be the poster child for a homeless bag lady. She’s been coming to Manna House for about three years, maybe longer.  She’s also not much for conversation.  She is rarely lucid.  Still, I’m grateful to see her each morning, and I have the same hopes for Laura as I do for Elijah.

            Elijah and Laura have stayed on my mind through this week.  Over the past year or so there’s been some progress in regard to homelessness in Memphis.  Government money has come in and along with donations from the private sector that has helped get some people housed.  “Outreach, Housing, and Community” (O.H.C.) is one of the agencies with which we work closely, and they have done a tremendous job getting people off the streets.  Housing is the only way to end homelessness.  It seems silly to have to state something so obvious.

            But there isn’t enough money for everyone to get housed.  And a program to help people get housed is always susceptible to cuts advocated by politicians running on platforms of demonizing and criminalizing the poor, of cutting government spending, and cutting taxes.  Certainly we’ll have to keep agitating and organizing for funding for housing.

            Meanwhile, we’ll keep working with O.H.C. and others who get people into housing.  And we will keep offering hospitality at Manna House.  

For many, if not most of our guests, that hospitality includes robust conversation, laughter, Scrabble games, and easy interactions, along with the showers and “socks and hygiene.”  Among these guests are some who have gotten housing, and Manna House serves as a kind of community center.

But there remain others, like Elijah and Laura, for which our hospitality is primarily being a place of sanctuary where they won’t be bothered or harassed.  I hope that in the midst of that welcome they might also experience that someone cares.  I hope that they will experience, as Craig Rennebohm writes in Souls in the Hands of a Tender God, that there is, “One who cares for us and dwells with us and holds us with an infinitely tender strength, One who is pained by our pain and passionate about our healing and well-being.” 

For each of us who offers hospitality we need that One as much as any of our guests.  In fact, that is why we are at Manna House too, for God’s hospitality which mysteriously comes to us through guests such as Elijah and Laura who are the very sacrament of God in “the least of these” (Matthew 25:31-46). “Welcome one another,” Paul wrote, “as Christ has welcomed you” (Romans 15:7).