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?

When I was a kid, “homeless” meant that you had lost your job and couldn’t pay your rent so you took turns living with relatives until you found a job. No one I knew lived on the street, under a bush, or in a tent in a canyon. I had never heard of such a thing.

When I grew up, I got married and moved to California where I discovered that there were people literally living in the street, under bridges, and in the canyons surrounding our city.

One fine summer day I decided to go to my favorite beach to soak up some rays. When I arrived I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen since the previous year.

“Hey Rick. I haven’t seen you around.”

“Yeah, I kind of fell off the map. I lost my job last fall and couldn’t find another one. I lost my apartment and ended up on the street.”

“You didn’t have a place to live?” I asked.

“No. I was living in a sleeping bag under a bridge behind the Warehouse restaurant and spending the day in a park a couple of miles away.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah. I’m serious. But it’s worse than that. I almost died in January.”

“You did? What happened?”

“Remember that ice storm we had?” Rick asked.

“Yes, I remember.”

“I was at the park when it started to rain. By the time I got back to the sleeping bag I had stowed under the bridge I was soaked to the skin. I crawled into the bag and got it wet too. The temperature was dropping and it started sleeting. I started shivering and shaking and couldn’t get warm.”

“That’s terrible. What happened?”

“Sometime during the night I passed out. The next morning someone found me under the bridge and thought I was dead. They called the cops, who checked me and found out I was still alive, but unconscious. The cops called an ambulance and I ended up spending five days in the hospital. They told me I almost died. My body temperature had dropped below what it’s supposed to be to keep you alive.”

I wanted to cry. How could this have happened to my friend? “Rick, you could have stayed at our house!” I told him.

“I lost your phone number. I didn’t want to bother anyone. I thought it would be a temporary thing. When I started sleeping under the bridge it was only getting down in the sixties at night.”

“Are you still living under the bridge?”

“No. Someone I know ran into me in the hospital and he helped me get a job at a fast food place. After I worked there a couple of months I found another job in my field. I’m back in an apartment and doing good now.”

“Wasn’t there some organization or church that could have helped you when you were on the street?”

“There were these people who fed us lunch every day in the park downtown. I’m not sure who they were, but I don’t think they had any place for me to get off the street.”

“They fed us lunch? Who is ‘us’?”

“Me and the other homeless people around here.”

“You’re saying there are other homeless people here?”

“Uh huh. Lots of them.”

“Where are they?”

“Living in the cracks where you don’t see them. Go downtown and you’ll walk right by them. Some of them are dressed a little shabby. Some of them look like anyone else. If you really want to meet some of them, go to the park downtown at noon. They’ll be there lined up for lunch.”

I was shocked. Homeless people in my town? How had I missed them?

Rick and I spent a couple of hours lying in the sun and talking. That evening at dinner I told Rick’s story to my wife.

After that, we didn’t think much more about it.

A couple of years later a friend asked if I could prepare lunch one day the following week for the homeless. The idea made me uncomfortable. What if I caught a disease from one of them? What would I do if one of them wanted money, or wanted to stay at my house?

Reluctantly, I agreed to make lunch for about sixty people. I was about as enthusiastic as I would have been if I had been planning to go to Calcutta to visit the slums. I did not know what to expect when I would actually meet sixty homeless people.

When the day to feed the homeless arrived, the people I met, people who had been unknown and faceless to me suddenly were sitting beside me as we shared stew, bread, and cherry cobbler.

I had expected filthy, stinking drunks with whiskey bottles in their hands and baggies of weed in their pockets.

Instead, the homeless people I met were not that much different from a lot of people I knew.

Some were poorly dressed. Some carried a backpack and sleeping bag. A few had shopping carts filled with their belongings. Several were probably under the influence of drugs or perhaps alcohol. But most of them looked and acted like I thought I might look and act if I were down on my luck.

How can I help people like these? Should I even be helping them? Maybe helping them just encourages them to continue living under bridges. I don’t have the resources to help them get into permanent housing. Shouldn’t the government take care of them?

“Thanks man,” one man said after finishing his lunch. “I want to let you know how much I appreciate this. This is the only time I’ll eat today and you gave me plenty to fill my stomach until tomorrow.” Many of the people who ate the lunch I had prepared said “Thank you, the food was good.” They had good manners, were respectful, well-spoken, and kind.

The homeless people were not that dissimilar to me.

This was quite a shock to me, and I began to ask questions that changed my view of homeless people forever.

How did these people end up on the street?

Do I know people who have ended up on the street?

Do I know people who are in danger of losing their homes?

I thought the poor and homeless lived in large cities like New York and Los Angeles. How many live in my own “backyard”?

Something I had heard somewhere popped into my mind: “If just a cup of water I place within your hand, then just a cup of water is all that I demand.”

I can’t give what I don’t have. But I do have a cup of water and I like these people. That’s a good place to start.

I knew that while I couldn’t save them all, and maybe I couldn’t even save any, I could at least give them a warm meal, a cup of water, or a new pair of socks.

But how do I figure out who among the homeless needs the most help? And how can I determine what the best way is for me to help?

In the following posts we will look at how my wife and I along with a few friends have been answering those questions.

Until then, what sorts of questions do you have about loving the homeless? Leave your questions in the comment section.