The past few days I have been in and around Chicago for Storyline, an AMAZING conference for Christian writers and creative types and oh my word do I have things to write about what I’ve learned there. That stuff can wait though.
Today my adventure buddy and I took the good ole Metra into the big city to explore (this mostly included sitting on a bench for a super long time). My adventure buddy, Lindsey, is super humble and I don’t want to embarrass her too much, but what you should know about her is that her heart is really good. This weekend was her first time in Chicago and she didn’t want to drag her feet around the city. In fact, the only real thing she expressed she wanted to do (aside from seeing Millennium Park… she is an American girl, after all) was help homeless people.
To take a pause to clarify, we did not at all go around the city and solve hunger and this was not at all something that I can have any credit for. We just talked to two people and gave them snacks, so don’t get any ideas about us being saints or something. Well, Lindsey might be. Anyhow…
We saw a man with a sign on a corner across the street, so we stopped in a McDonald’s and as we were purchasing cheeseburgers, brilliantly brilliant Lindsey said something I had never thought of before… “are you sure he’s hungry?” She said this not because she wanted to save $1, but because she wanted to make sure if we were going to meet a need, we knew what the real need was. Again, brilliant.
As we crossed the street hoping to feed a hungry belly, this was the tune of the dialogue:
Us: “Hi there, are you hungry?”
Man that God made: “Kinda hungry… depends on what you have.”
Us: “Oh, we have a cheeseburger. Would you like that?”
Man that God made: “I think so… see, the thing is I got all of my teeth pulled two weeks ago, so I can only eat soft things.”
Us: “Oh, that sounds super painful!”
Man that God made: “Yeah… a lot of people think I’m an ***-**** when I say that I don’t want what they offer me, but it just hurts to eat a lot of things.”
Me (I’ve never heard adventure buddy curse): “Well, we don’t think you’re an ***-****. God made you, so we think you must be pretty awesome.”
[Doesn’t your heart hurt for him, his hungry belly and his pulled teeth?!]
That’s what I said to him that time, but I have had previous encounters where people without access to food told me they only wanted my food if I had chicken and I thought “hmmmm, really not how I expected this to go.”
What Lindsey tried to teach me, this man drove home. We can’t actually meet needs until we take the time to learn what they are. Sometimes we think we know the problem and solution, but we don’t know what we don’t know.
I don’t know much, which is made glaringly obvious to me every single day. I don’t have a super detailed action plan on this one, but I do have a rhetorical question and some Lindsey wisdom...
Wouldn’t it be great if our society humanized homelessness?
I am clearly a cheeseburger sporting rookie here, but Lindsey modeled for me three great ways to do this:
- Ask for a name
- Ask for a story
- Ask for a need you can help meet
I’m going to try… do you want to try with me?
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