"Talking never got nobody nowhere." He kept repeating that, every time we reached a difficult point in the conversation. "You bring out your sandwiches, your warm bottles of water... but you can't get us out of here. No one can. Nothing can."
"I don't think it can happen overnight..."
"I've had people come out here and pray for me for three years... ain't fixed anything. I'm still in the same situation."
"Change takes time..."
"Three years is long enough."
Déjà vu. I've had this same conversation with this same man before. We may be sitting in the cool air of the fountain of Philadelphia's name-sake park tonight, but he's lower than he was when I first met him in the underground concourse-- a kind of oxymoronic homeless village. Not only is he homeless, he is hopeless. He's beyond feeling desperate; he's clinging to nothing but despair.
"I may have never been homeless, but I've been through my own 'situations' and difficulties... they're different, I know, but the struggle is the same..."
"You'd have to be homeless to know what it's like."
"I realize that, but what I'm saying is maybe it's not the situation, maybe it's something deeper than that, beyond the physical. Maybe it is a spiritual thing. Maybe the situation is with you, not with 'this.'"
Hit and sink. Here was this fifty-year-old black man, happily enjoying the night air and a little food. He didn't mind sitting alone, picking through his thoughts. But then comes this Christian, this ideal-driven college brat, thinking she can pray for him and love him and and tell him that his life is in shambles because he can't bear to look at his own soul. Who does she think she is to downsize his three years of agony into some sort of spiritual shenanigan?
He threw his backpack over a shoulder and poured out his water into one of those pathetic cement pots clogging up the middle of the park. He said something, similar to same sad lines he'd had on repeat before. I replied and said his name, thinking that'd make my own refrain stick harder, "K--, I hope you get out of this. I hope to see you happy some day."
God, I really do. If I can't accomplish anything, let me at least hope. May he learn to hope too.
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kathryn, thanks for that post. it really illuminates the struggles that the people we meet face on a daily basis.
ReplyDeleteit's sad when the hopelessness of this physical world blinds us to the hope we have in God. it's even sadder when the hope that people have in this temporary world blinds us to the hopelessness we face without God.
we are all like that man, our sin weights us down, we are all unbelievably dirty without Christ's sacrifice. let's spur each other on to see the grace that is bestowed upon us, all of us, for we were all hopelessly unworthy but made new in Him.