Orlando

      Last Tuesday, five friends and I went downtown to feed some of our homeless friends. We spent 60$ on groceries which could feed 80 people. We bought individual bags of chips, Capri Suns, and made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It had been 2 years since I had done this. For the past two years I have been a part of planning potlucks the second Saturday of the month, movie nights, and cooking breakfast to serve at the labor pool’s. It was before the inception of home sweet homeless that I had gone downtown to search for people to feed. From the start, the idea behind HSH was relational. We started with the potluck, and out of the relationships built there we met the needs of our new friends. I have spent the majority of my time working with the individuals who I met at these events trying to meet their needs. We had become accustomed to planned events, but that night we had planned to go back to the early days of PB and J and a good walk around downtown. When we first started passing out sandwiches we would feed 20-30 people so we figured that we could take the extra meals to one of the shelters.

     My experience on Tuesday seemed drastically different from my experiences two years ago. As we started walking downtown, we split into two groups with 25 meals each. I lead my group to the Northeast corner of the park, a spot that usually has 5-10 people at it. We began passing out sandwiches but people kept coming until we passed out all our food. We went back to the jeep to get the rest of the food and ended up feeding 30-40 people at that one spot. The entire group voiced their appreciation for the food. After they were fed we kept walking around the lake to get to the bus stop, gator-park, and the library. At Gator Park we ran into a group of guys who knew a few of my friends who were with me. One of them in particular came up saying, “hey guys we really appreciate all you do. I know you don’t hear that enough.” They smiled, told us stories for a few minutes and we laughed together. They sent us with their blessings and we headed back to the park.

      On the way back I couldn’t help but thinking back three years ago when I first started going down town.  I remember the first homeless person I ever spoke to. His name was Whiskers. He was sitting on the same bench at Gator Park as the guys we just met. I remember he was surprised that we stopped to talk to him. And as I think about what the homeless community looked like back then, I see two main differences; first, there are more homeless people now; secondly, there are more people who are serving and actively loving the homeless. It truly has been a beautiful sight to see our city come together with love. It’s certainly not perfect. But we have come so far. I can see it in the faces of those whom we serve. It’s evident when people put down their cardboard signs to come say hey to a friend. It’s so wonderful to see all of the people interacting at the bible studies and potlucks, and to see the relationships carry over into the rest of the week. It has been such a blessing to my life to watch our city mature, to see our community dream of change and to try to be that change.

 

Sweet Peace.

David