Before we can help poor and homeless people, we needed to learn to see them. Learning to see the poor and the homeless was the topic of a previous post.

After we started seeing poor and homeless people everywhere, we weren’t sure how to help them.

Start in Small Ways

We started helping in small ways. We want to help people, not make their lives worse by enabling them to remain in poverty or on the street.

How could we do that?

Since I had prepared lunch for the homeless, I contacted the directors of that program and offered to prepare lunch again. My wife helped me prepare and share lunch in the park and dinner in the local homeless shelter several times in the years that followed.

I also met with the people who directed other local homeless programs. They advised how they thought we could best help the homeless in our community, and also gave us advice about working with the homeless. Later in this series I will mention some of that advice.

When we shared lunch and dinner, we spent time talking to and getting to know those with whom we shared. We began building friendships and learned from our new friends what they needed most.

Food, Clothes, and More

We began a program in our church at Christmas. Following an annual church dinner that took place the first Sunday of December, we provided numerous opportunities for our congregation to provide needed items for the homeless, battered women and children, poor Native Americans who lived on the reservation, and poor in our community.

Although some people in the church had no interest in helping the poor and homeless, most wanted to help. Each Christmas we gathered a large quantity of mostly new clothing, toys, and other items and distributed them.

By accident I discovered that a family we knew had run out of money and food. Since I cooked dinner for the church once a week, I always had extra food.

Over the following months I gave them a case of steak, lots and lots of cranberry salad, and a variety of other food items. Once they got back on their feet they laughed and told me “We were embarrassed to tell anyone we were broke, but every night we had steak for dinner.”

During the following years we shared food with various families whose cupboards were literally bare.

When we began paying attention to the people in our community, we not only began seeing the poor and homeless, but we also began building relationships with them and began finding ways that we could come alongside them in their hour of need.

How Can We Help 10,000 People?

Eventually our jobs led us to San Diego, where there are many poor and homeless, far more than there were in any place we had previously lived. Based on the annual homeless count, a day when teams attempt to count every homeless person in the city (an impossible task), most homeless organizations here believe that over 10,000 homeless people live in our city.

How can we begin to help 10,000 homeless people and many more poor people in a large city? Crawling into a warm bed, pulling the covers under our chins and trying to forget about people sleeping on sidewalks, under bridges, and even under bushes on cold nights would be so easy.

What can we do? How can we help 10,000 homeless people?

In the remaining posts in this series, we will answer that question as well as look at some of the things we do to help the homeless and poor, which will hopefully give you some ideas of ways in which you can help the poor and homeless where you live.

The request “Can you prepare lunch for the homeless one day next week?” resulted in the opportunity to meet sixty homeless people, which at the time I assumed were the first homeless people I had ever met. Gradually, however, I realized that I had previously met and known other homeless people, but just didn’t know they were homeless.

Most of our communities are home to poor people and to homeless people. Somehow I had overlooked both groups of people in the communities in which I had lived. How could that possibly have happened?

I Don’t Know Any Poor or Homeless People, Do I?

Perhaps I had overlooked the poor because my family by today’s standards would have been considered poor. We had a house, food to eat and a car to drive, but not many extras. I never heard anyone call us poor. Our family laughed when we discovered that we were barely above the “federal poverty level” line.

My parents referred to people who were better off than us financially as “rich”. I knew who those people were. They lived in the part of town with the expensive houses.

However, I did not think I knew homeless people.

Sure, I knew about hobos. We lived near the railroad tracks. Hobos appeared at our door and asked for food and sometimes clothing. My mother always gave them something, as her mother always had. They knew the way to our house. However, I never knew where they lived.

I knew about bums and winos. I saw them in the street, usually dressed in ragged clothes. Occasionally they asked for spare change. I also didn’t know where they lived.

I knew about people who temporarily lived with friends or relatives “until they could get back on their feet”, and afford to rent a room, apartment or house. Some of those people were my relatives. But they did have a roof over their heads. I never heard anyone call them homeless.

Learning to See

After that day in the park eating lunch with the homeless, however, I started seeing poor and homeless people everywhere. I assumed there must be an influx of poor and homeless people into my community. As I would eventually realize that what had changed was not who was moving into my community. I had changed. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the reality that is our world.

Soon I knew the volunteers in the homeless programs in our town. I met the woman who ran a local shelter for abused women and children, most of them from poor homes. Within a year or two I knew the people in our community who worked with the poor, the homeless, the abused, the battered, and the overlooked.

My wife and I began meeting not only the people who worked with the poor and homeless, but also, and most importantly, we began meeting the poor and homeless. We began building friendships and relationships with them.

We discovered that we like people who live under bridges, under bushes, in canyons, in tents, and on sidewalks, as well as the poor, lonely, and needy who have roofs over their heads. We are friends with the homeless, and friends help friends. So we help our homeless friends.

How can we best help our friends? Future posts about our journey with the poor and homeless will look at some of the ways in which we are answering that question, and how you can too.

Until then, how are you finding ways to help your friends among the poor and the homeless? If you do not yet have any homeless friends, what are you doing to begin seeing them around you?