For Wilshire Baptist Church
Working upstairs at my desk, I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned to look out the window and saw Carla walking down the middle of the street. Her mouth was moving as if in conversation, and she was shifting a small black purse from one shoulder to the other and flipping the top open and shut repeatedly. When she doesn’t have the purse, her hands are always moving like she’s recalling gestures from an old dance routine. She walks with purpose like she knows where she’s going, and yet I know she is lost in a certain way.
Carla is her real name, and I often don’t mention real names, but the homeless are real people and they deserve to be recognized as real people and not just statistics. Statistics are easy to ignore. Real people with real names? Not so much.
Carla walks by at least once a week. I see her walking west to east, probably toward the little convenience store down the way, and then a half hour later or so she’ll come the other way, probably headed back to wherever she lives. That may be down on Duck Creek, or in the trees behind Kroger, or perhaps in a vacant house or garage. I’ve never walked out to see where she goes and where she turns.
I know Carla is her name because that’s the name she gave when she rang our doorbell one day. She had seen our neighborhood association sign in the yard and came to ask if we were “some sort of information center” for the neighborhood. We’re not — at least not in the way I think she meant, as in information about housing, food, other services. I didn’t shoo her away, but I didn’t give her any reason to stay either.
Carla did come and stay one Sunday morning on her own. We have a Ring doorbell, and I felt my phone buzz in my pocket during church. When I finally got around to looking at the video, I saw that Carla had walked up onto our porch and turned toward the porch swing and rockers. Several hours later she left the porch. She was barefoot and wearing her usual shorts and blouse but she had a blanket draped across her shoulders. I suspect she came up for a nap or at least a quiet sit.
Carla is not the only homeless person we see on our street. Others walk by from time to time. During the first week of school, we put an ice chest out with bottled water under the tree by our turquoise picnic table with a sign that said, “Free Water.” Our intent was to offer the high schoolers a little refreshment on their walk home in the heat. A few helped themselves, but so did a couple with backpacks and rolling suitcases. They sat at the table awhile and drank water while reorganizing their loads. And one evening a man named Matt rang the bell. He had seen the water sign too but we’d already move the ice chest inside. We gave him a couple of bottles from the fridge and thought that was the end of it but he began talking. We probably would have heard his entire life story had we not explained that we needed to go and slowly closed the door. I guess we did shoo him away.
The homeless are an ongoing problem in our community, and they probably are in yours too. Some say the “problem” is: How do we get them out of our neighborhoods and out of sight and thus out of mind? But the real problem actually is: How can we get them off the streets and into housing and jobs and making a living and having a normal life like we all want? It’s a puzzle for sure, but simply moving them from town to town and neighborhood to neighborhood isn’t the answer. Neither is shooing them away and closing the door.
Living in the old downtown area of Garland, we’re acutely aware of the problem and the challenges. We’re also aware of the churches and agencies near us that are working on this, including Good Samaritan and Friendship House. The city is working on it too, and we got an update earlier this week from our neighborhood police officer and city council representative about their efforts. Our local police force has officers and trained social workers dedicated to providing help to the homeless – at least those who will accept help. It’s a hard truth that some don’t want help.
Maybe a good start for the rest of us is to call them by name. After all, they do have names, and once you know someone’s name, it’s hard to ignore them. And even if we don’t know them well, God does. God knows Matt, and God knows Carla. What’s more, God knows they want more of a life than they’re living now. If we search our own souls, we know that too.