Homelessness...

A few fellow Vagabonds and I recently got the opportunity to spend some time with the homeless population of L.A. I have spent time with the homeless in Morgantown, but I've never in my life experienced anything like downtown L.A. at night. We didn't even make it to the area of highest homeless concentration, but there were people on every corner, sleeping. In this land of excess and wealth there is a forgotten group of people who literally sleep on the doorstep of excess. We got the chance to spend some time talking with a few different people and every time I spend time with these people I find it harder to retreat to a warm bed when I get cold or tired...

I was thinking last night about how easy and hard it would be at the same time for me to end up homeless. I really don't know if I could survive in that atmosphere... The streets are hard... I'm not sure there is any way to no the extent of this without experiencing it. I experienced it once in Morgantown when we left our safe circle to go round up people to come get food. We walked down the rail-trail and got caught in the middle of an arguing/cussing match with baseball bats involved. I immediately thought of this event when our new friend Papa Wayne gave us some advice. He said that, "on the streets, you have to deal with people on their own level. If they want to deal on an intelligent level then you have to do it that way, but if they want to deal on a physical level, well, I'm good at that."

I want to give a little background on Papa Wayne at this point. His name is Carol Wayne(I wouldn't call him that upon first meeting him or you might risk a beating:-). He is one of the most loving and amazing people I've ever met in my entire life... He's a veteran of the conflict in Vietnam. He's a pack rat. We took food to him and left with more stuff than we came with. He couldn't believe how lucky Justin and I were to live in a house with 12 women(although we argued emphatically that we were not lucky at all, more cursed). In all honesty though, I have no idea how he ended up where he is. I do know that he's been in the same general area for roughly 18 years.

I read recently that it is projected that in the near future there will be 1.5 million more homeless people in the U.S. That number isn't acceptable... I don't know what the solution is. I know that God has a heart for the poor. He loves everyone, but dealing with the poor is a common thread through the whole thing. It is not acceptable for "The Church" to take food out once a week and pat themselves on the back for "helping" and then go back to warm beds... I mean anything we do is good but it's not enough. We live lives of such excess with cars, computers, ipods, cell phones, clothes, cameras, shoes, bikes, big houses, hundreds of dollars worth of camping gear, and we've even surrounded ourselves with fancy leather bound Bibles... Most of those things are pulled directly from my life...

I don't have a pretty picture to go along with this blog because there's no way to capture what I'm feeling...

This post is already too long, but I have more to say... We met with Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS Shoes, yesterday and I have reflections to talk about from that meeting. He's a pretty amazing dude and for sure an inspiration in many ways!

Leaving you with mucho love!

~D