Digging Out The Bracelet

Have you ever been on an emotional roller coaster bouncing between two totally different worlds? If you have, perhaps you can relate to what I’ve encountered the past several days.After many years, I finally actually got to see what a government tax refund check looks like and to contemplate what to do with one. In addition, I’ve been able to share the joy of friends who are discussing spending many thousands of dollars on some neat projects. In spite of the headlines and plunging economic charts, life is generally pretty good for many of us.I am preparing another narrated pictorial presentation to tell about my journey to Kolkata, India. Somehow when I look at pictures of my friends there and especially of the kids, I start to get a strange feeling. Why can’t they be safely in an orphanage instead of on the streets going through the garbage?Things got much closer to home with a call from a dear friend. She asked if we could visit her daughter in a local hospital. Her daughter, the mother of a seventeen-year-old estranged daughter herself, is a favorite in our household. I have special fond memories of the bond that she formed with my daughter on a mission’s trip to be with homeless folks in the bowels of Chicago. In fact, the last time I saw her she was sitting on the front row of the church where I worship.I wasn’t quite prepared for what I found in room 501. I recognized the toothy smile, but the just over one hundred pound lady behind it was someone new to us. You see, she had flirted with heroin and gotten caught in its quagmire. Even though a car ran over her feet breaking most of the bones and necessitating a new steel rod in her leg, she was anxious to get back to the streets. I chuckled when they came to give her a choice of three entrees for dinner and she said “all of them.” (She ate them all, too) The doctor came in to tell her that they had to release her but that they would give her a wheel chair to take with her.We followed up several days later looking for her under a local bridge that she has recently called her “home.” She had, somehow, navigated down a muddy bank in her wheelchair to her “home,” but was gone at the moment. We chatted with her friends and comrades. Each had a tale of their own about why they were there. Many had mental health and addiction connections. Many relayed a poignant spiritual journey.One lady, obviously drunken to a stupor, tearfully told how she would be going to court the following day to sign over the future of her five-month-old infant “for a better life.” Another young couple in their late teens told how they had dragged an old sofa several blocks and then down through the mud for their bedding here. She was pregnant with their first child and we found out we had mutual church friends. They both needed a whole list of meds to function but looked forward to being parents. I didn’t ask if they’d be raising him or her under the bridge. I could go on with tales of life under the bridge but it appears that there will soon be new chapters as the city reclaims the area and evicts and scatters the folks. They will all go somewhere. I know that many are really skilled at working the system. They told me of the folks who bring MacDonald’s, KFC, and pizza offerings. In fact, one gent sometimes makes up to two hundred dollars many days panhandling and working his “homeless-will work for food” gig. Still, you can’t help but sense needs that go far deeper than food or money.The fact remains that even armed with this limited understanding and genuine compassion; I have no idea of a strategy to make a difference. Guess it’s time to dig out that old WWJD bracelet again.