Night at the Mission

It's been two weeks now since I spent a night at a local rescue mission in cognito. I wanted to write about it before the experience is too far past.

I chose to go there because I hoped to come away from the experience with a little more understanding and sympathy for those living life on the streets. I also hoped to get a better grip on the stratification that exists in our society between the haves and the have-nots. I defintely got both.

The whole idea was sparked by the girl who presented at the orientation I attended for those interested in volunteering at the mission. At one point she noted that prior to them hiring a new person, they used to ask him or her to actually spend a night living with the men or women at the mission. They no longer require this, but the idea stuck with me.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how far from that lifestyle I really am--not that I couldn't end up there in a heartbeat--but all of us so insulate ourselves from the struggles of the thousands of homeless and millions of poverty-stricken people in our society that we cannot fathom what their lives must be like. Consequently we often lack any real compassion for them.

After this experience, I don't profess to "understand" homelessness and its many causes. Nor do I have any real answers to propose. Instead, I believe I simply grasp a little better what it is to spend a night there and the lives of the individuals who call it home.

Check in was at 7:00. After dressing in some fairly normal, perhaps slightly worn-looking clothes and a baseball cap, Barb and the kids dropped me off at 6:30, 6 blocks from the mission.
I got there early and, like the others, I loitered around the front of the building until the doors opened. A lot of cars traveled that street and would stop at the intersection in front of the mission. For the first time in my life, I felt the humiliation of being eyed with contempt or completely ignored by passersby simply for being homeless--judged and labeled, even though they didn't know me at all.

Once we got inside the building, we all stood in a waiting area. In the corner was a man lying half-dressed on a dirty sleeping bag. Another man in a Reds baseball cap sat nearby rocking and mumbling to himself. There were your typical homeless-looking men, bearded, disheveled, hardened, but there were also many others who, had they not been standing in line with me, you wouldn't be able to identify them as anything but ordinary citizens with homes in the 'burbs. And that was one of the things that stood out so starkly to me--many of these men are simply there because they need a place of transition between their former life and their new, and hopefully different, one.

During check in I observed how the staff treated the men. It was obvious that they were professionals as they proceeded in the difficult task with ease. At one point, after having his bag checked through, a man was told to leave and not return until he had gotten rid of the liquer and pornography he'd hidden in his bag. The staff person was firm and straight faced, but he remained friendly throughout. Never once did I witness anyone being treated poorly or with disrespect.

As my turn came to check in, they patted me down for weapons, checked my bag, took my name, and sent me in to find my way around. If there was any apprehension on my part that night, it was then. I didn't really know where to go or what to do. As I was wondering the halls, one of those "homeless-looking" men came up and gave me some direction as to what I should do. When I said thanks, he responded, "Hey, we've all had our first time here before." I'm not saying that the mission is a place you'd want to spend the rest of your life it, or that it's heaven on earth, but inspite of their living conditions and the daily grind of life on the street, kindness still existed in the hearts of some of these men.

Following his advice, I found my way to where they kept the sleeping mats. Since it was my first night, I got to spend the night on the floor. I entered a large room containing about 25 bunk beds. Each one had a fairly clean looking mattress which the men covered with the clean sheets the staff gave to each of us. I found a place on the floor that was as out of the way as I could get and made my bed. I pretty much spent the rest of the evening from 7:45 until midnight lying there listening to the conversations around me.

Many of the men there were just out of prison and trying to get back on their feet. It surpised me how many of them had cell phones and spent a lot of time talking on them. The banter was friendly and you could tell many of them knew each other pretty well. Certain men seemed to have more authority in the place that others. There was some friendly bickering over which direction the large industrial fan in the corner would face as it was hot in there. Gradually the men continued to file in until most of the beds were full.

Sleep was hard to come by. Like I said, it was nearly midnight before I could fall asleep. Part of it was because my mind was processing the experience, but part of it was the discomfort of the floor, the heat, the noise, the talking, and the turning on and off of lights (to much protest) as someone had to look for something. I had slept for a couple of hours when loud sirens passed by and woke many of us up again. This happened again at about 4:30 a.m. I'd finally gotten back to sleep when at 5:30, the lights came on and we all received the morning wake up call. It was back to the streets.

I folded my bed and made my way back out the front door. By now, the floors were crowded with men lying all around. I could tell that the men I had come in with at 7:00 the night before were probably some of the onse who had some hope of getting out of this cycle. But the men I saw on the floors, meaning they were first-timers like me or they were too late to get a bed, looked much harder, much more abused and wasted. I guess many were probably drug addicts who stumbled in after their stash or their money ran out and the high started to wear off. To see human beings in such a state left me deeply saddened.

Once outside, it was strange how the men simply faded into the background of the city. Like grains of sand they sifted along the streets, between the buildings, until they came to their resting place for the day. Some certainly went to jobs, but many others would sink to the sewers of society until evening came once again.

The message of the mission is this: "Rescuing the downtrodden. Restoring hope to the hopeless. Releasing God's greatness to our communities." In some sense, I witnessed that first hand as men found food, shelter, and a sense of dignity in that building and through the staff. At the same time, I left feeling discouraged because homelessness and its deeper causes will, as Jesus said, always be among us. What keeps driving us, and even more, the staff of the mission, to continue to care for these men when there's little outward sign of appreciation and perhaps even contempt? I concluded that it could only be the work of Christ in our hearts and the understanding that when we serve the least of these, we are serving Jesus himself. God, help me never to forget it.