I hate Friday nights! Sounds odd, doesn’t it? Let me explain. I love my job at the homeless shelter so much there are actually days when I am not ready to leave. It is not so much that I am drawn to the paperwork, emails and phone calls. It is that I am drawn to the mission and the cause. My days of frustration and exhaustion quickly evaporate when I walk downstairs, to grab my caffeine pick-me-up, and engage with the women and children who call the shelter home. As I walk to the coffee maker, I pass addicts, felons, ladies struggling with mental illness and other women who call ACCESS home. I pass by children waking up to another day living in a homeless shelter. In a few moments, they will gather their backpacks and wait for the school bus in front of a homeless shelter. After pouring my coffee I quickly return to my office invigorated and ready to work tirelessly to help the women and children who call ACCESS home. It wasn’t the coffee that energized me, it was the people. It was their story, it was the look in their eyes, and it was the human face of poverty and injustice. It was the hope of possibly finding someone who can help us further our mission and the desire to see true change come to one of our women that day.
Each day as I turn off my office light and log out for the day, I leave with hope that maybe it will come tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow affordable housing won’t be so scarce, that jobs will be offered and we can close the doors and go out of business. I often wonder what our building would become when we can stop being a homeless shelter. Maybe it would become a spa or a retail business. I love the irony in that. Everyone on staff would embrace the end to homelessness and enthusiastically search for new employment.
If a woman is still at the shelter on Friday, she will be there on Monday. It is rare that anything changes for a client over the weekend. Agencies that offer assistance are closed, staff is smaller and hope is on hold for the weekend. There is always tomorrow, but not on Fridays.
At the end of each Friday there is almost a sense of defeat, knowing that another week has passed and there is still a need for the shelter to exist. Each Friday night as I walk to my car, there are always women outside for a smoke break. Walking to my car, I am haunted by “Have a good weekend, Ms. Joy” and “See you Monday, Ms. Joy!” Oh the injustice and unfairness of my weekend at home with family and friends. My weekend of freedom to go where I want. . . the injustice of not everyone being able to have “a good weekend.” The injustice of not everyone being able to have a home. That is why I hate Fridays.
Actually it’s not Fridays that I despise. It’s the injustice of homelessness. If I worked at an orphanage, it would be my anger at orphans being without a family for one more night. If I were employed at a battered women’s home, it would be the disappointment in a woman being out of her home one more evening as she nurses her wounds and disguises her bruises. It all comes down to the injustice of the underserved and the overlooked and the marginalized of our society.
Scripture calls this group “the least of these.” I call them my new friends. Scripture calls them the orphans and widows. I call them the lady who sat with my at lunch or the child who drew me a picture yesterday.
I often sit in meeting where politicians and social service agencies discuss the plight of the homeless and brainstorm ways to eradicate the problem with a ten -year plan. It seems that we have taken this population and reduced them to statistics and demographics. I sit and listen and have to do all that is within not to run out of the room and run straight to the nearest church. I want to storm into the Pastor’s office and shout, “WE NEED YOU!” I want to then run to the next church and confront them on why 45 women and children are living in a homeless shelter within walking distance of their steeple- bearing building. I want to ask them to preach from the pulpit the command to serve others and not stop until every person embraces the call on their life and exhausts themselves for the Gospel. I want to intrude on every women’s Bible study within reach and beg them to come and help their sisters! I want to ask them to stop planning teas and potlucks and begin planning ways to walk alongside an overwhelmed mom or a woman in search of a job and housing. It sounds so simple and I am in no way bashing the church. I believe that churches are doing amazing things to help the marginalized, but are we doing enough? I am actually doing the proverbial “preaching to the choir.”
I haven’t always had this passion for the underserved of the world. I am guilty of ignoring their needs and driving past them, passing judgment on what I assume is their laziness. I am guilty of being too busy to stop and pray for a woman who is hurting or to offer a kind word to a broken sister. I am not leading this battle. I am searching just like the rest of you. But I do know something, I am hoping and praying that the homeless, the orphans, the widows are not judging us. I am concerned that they can look and see themselves being let down. I am hoping that they don’t see us as “religious women” but that they see us as faithful women.
I wonder what the world would look like if we all found our cause. What would it look like if we all took the scriptures seriously and to heart and lived the Bible out with an unbound and relentless obedience. I am not sure what it would look like, but I do know one thing. . . it would look different! The world would look different, the church would look different and we would be different.
