service

It Matters to This One.

/ Erin Kirk / 2 Comments

Last week, standing under a bridge in Long Beach, California with a plate of food in hand, I talked to a Vietnam veteran with two Bowie knives strapped to his legs. His tirade about the Federal Government was looping, so I interrupted him and asked his name.

“People call me Diablo,” he said.

“No sh*t,” I thought looking at the madness in his brown eyes.

Then trying to communicate something extra important, Diablo reached his index finger to touch my forehead, but I dodged it. Dream Center staff told us ahead of time, personal space is a good thing and lines are clearly drawn, so they can keep serving people who live under bridges.

Now, I’ve been as guilty as anyone for thinking snarky thoughts about homeless people who beg or are super drunk or high on the street.

“Why don’t they get a job and work like the rest of us.”

“Those people are there by choice.”

And it’s true, many people are homeless because they don’t like structure and don’t want to play by society’s rules.

But it’s also true that some are so far down, it’s impossible to get up without help, and that includes many who return from our wars with obvious and not-so-obvious damage.

According to the Center for American Progress, one in every seven homeless adults is a US Veteran; and Kaiser Health News reports the number of veterans using mental health services has jumped 34 percent since 2006. So the homeless guy you see begging at the intersection has a one in seven chance of being a US Veteran. Yikes!

Global problems seem to want global solutions, but I don’t have any. What can I do? Well, I just jumped in and Diablo scaled the problem down for me – to exactly one. I can handle one. I can feed one, I can listen to one.

starfish

(Photo credit: kevinzim)

Ever hear of the kid picking up starfish and throwing them back in the water? His father pointed out hundreds more stranded by the tide, noting how little his efforts would matter. The kid shrugged and said “well, it matters to this one” and chucked it back in the water.

I kind of imagine Jesus like that. He is the good shepherd who will leave the 99 in his flock to search for the lost one. Jesus stopped on a very busy day to heal one hemorrhaging woman; He stopped to heal a demon-possessed man living among the tombs and yet another man blind from birth.

So, I think it boils down to a choice of two paths – something I talk about a lot. Are we going to live like the kid throwing starfish back or like the Dad who, concerned about his son’s expectations, explains the futility of the effort.

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” Matthew 19:26

BTW – Visit Operation Dignity if you want to help out some vets for Christmas.

An Evening On Skid Row

/ Erin Kirk / 2 Comments

Skid Row is a twelve-block section of downtown Los Angeles with the highest concentration of violent crime on the West Coast. It is home to an estimated 5,000 people who ball up under cardboard boxes and plastic tarps at night. Sirens echo off the buildings, and the streets smell like weed and urine.

I’d show you pictures of it, but I can’t. It was too dark. Literally. I spent Friday night there with about 60 people from the LA Dream Center.

I can’t begin to tell you what a bad idea I thought that was.

But Dream Center teams have been showing up on Skid Row, day after day and every Friday night for years. They have so much street cred with the community, the game is entirely changed – even in the dark with sirens and crack smoke.

“Hey where’d all these white people come from?” I heard someone yell as we milled through the crowd.

“‘Dude, it’s the Dream Center,” somebody yelled back.

“Oh, ok cool.”

The residents of Skid Row trust the Dream Center, so they tell their stories and break your heart. When I finally pushed through the fear of going, I got to look in the eyes of a Vietnamese man who asked if I could get him a new tent, because his was broken. I prayed for a babbling woman in a wheelchair and found some Doritos for a 90-lb woman sleeping under clear plastic on the sidewalk.

Yes, many of them were extremely high and about as broken as a human can be, but they all have eyes and you can look into them; and that changes everything. Then, when they thank you for coming and treating them like humans, well…

But the question looms:

Aren’t we enabling people to be addicts and homeless by feeding them on Skid Row?

It’s a hard question. But many in the Dream Center’s army, who have escaped the cycle of poverty and addiction, will tell you – Jesus can fix this. He does it all the time. Furthermore, as the Apostle Paul told the Romans:

But how can people call for help if they don’t know who to trust? And how can they know who to trust if they haven’t heard of the One who can be trusted? And how can they hear if nobody tells them? And how is anyone going to tell them, unless someone is sent to do it? Rom 10:14-16 The Message

The Dream Center volunteers, who sit on dirty sidewalks and pray for crack smoking homeless people, do it because Christ died to rescue all of us messed-up sinners, and it doesn’t matter how messed up. And if by offering food to a junk-sick homeless woman, The Dream Center can convince her there is a God who loves her and wants to fix her mess, they’ll keep doing it.

After all, to catch fish, you must go fishing.

To support the work of The Los Angeles Dream Center click here.

Don’t Let Him Shake Your Tree.

/ Erin Kirk / 2 Comments

My husband Sam loves the word addled. Truly, it’s a pretty good word with great synonyms like muzzy, woozy and befuddled.

He doesn’t apply it to me very often, because I’m usually steady. But in preparing to spend all this week serving the urban poor at the LA Dream Center, I was shilly-shallying and futzing around so badly, I thought I might have dementia. I even threw my wallet in the kitchen garbage and walked away with a soggy paper towel in hand. I worried about it to Sam.

“It’s because you’re going to LA to do something you’ve never done and you’re scared,” he said.

He’s right. I’ve never wandered under a bridge to hand out hot food to a homeless person. I’ve never played with neglected kids in a gang-infested urban neighborhood. What am I doing?

I’ll tell you what I’m doing, I’m climbing out on a limb, because that’s where the fruit is, and when you’re a new climber, like me, it’s good to follow the professional climbers. The LA Dream Center, which is the single largest food bank in LA County and serves 40,000 people every month in its 273 ministries, not only climbs to the best fruit, but they pick it and toss it down to everyone else.

The Apostle Paul said, the promises of God all find their yes in Jesus, and I’ve decided there are too many people (Bob Goff, Katie Davis, Matthew Barnett) doing impossible, God-promised things to doubt Jesus’ extravagant yes.

But I don’t want to just pig out on the grace of God until I’m bloated from hoarding it. It’s designed for sharing. Jesus wants me on my feet, darting nimbly through the world as his little cracked-pot, ambassador. As Katie Davis says in her lovely memoir from Uganda, where by age 19 she’d adopted the first six of her 14 orphans, we don’t have to be talented, we just have to be available.

The problem with shouting this manifesto is, the enemy hears it. And when you get halfway out your limb, he starts shaking your tree, hoping you’ll turn back. The devil doesn’t want me learning to serve people like Jesus did, and he sure doesn’t want me telling you how to do it. So he opposes me using the only things he has, anxiety, fear, confusion, rejection etc. The Apostle Paul explains it like this:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Eph 6:12.

Yes, it’s tempting to bail out when I’m anxious and shaky, and can’t hold a coherent thought or keep my wallet out of the trash, but then I think, “bail out to where?” Jesus blew up all the bridges behind me. The only way left is forward.

And in this case, it goes through LA.