Giving Life, Possessing Hope

In the little town where I used to live I have been a volunteer at a shelter for the battered, the homeless. People ask why I do that. It's often depressing, and sometimes thankless. Part of it is I've seen spots of my life in some of those eyes, and I wish to do what I can to help those that got there through now fault of their own.

Many of us live homeless. Not in our dwelling, but in the neighborhood of our true self. We spend so much time chasing after things, that we ignore what we have right under our nose. Some of the most unhappiest people I know have the most expensive possessions. I sold or gave away half of mine last year, freeing myself up to downsize and pay off debt. I sometimes look at pictures of my big fancy home, and my little space now and have a twinge of regret, but not often. There's money in the bank now, no debt other than a student loan. Writing a check to the vet for $1000 to save Barkley's life when they found the tumor didn't mean I'd miss a meal. I'm freer to travel, visit friends out of the area, and tend to my Dad, providing him with a few things in his final years to make him more comfortable.


When I got my first well paying job I sponsored a child in Africa through one of the Charitable Christian organizations. The little I gave provided some schooling and at least one nourishing meal a day. We were allowed to give extra money with only the dictate that the money be used for household needs with someone there to make sure the money got spent for what it was intended. So one time, when bills were light I sent a few hundred extra dollars.

I got a letter back from the little girl I sponsored, Louise Marie, hand written, with colorful crayon drawings of a little house. Apparently, before the gift, she and her brothers and sisters and their widowed mother had been living in the open, in a lean-to, her mother's $50 a month income as a sustenance farmer not enough to house them. With the money I sent they built a house. A HOUSE. For just a few hundred dollars.It wasn't a house like you and I expect to live in. But it was a grand house by what they were used to. With four walls, and a floor and a metal roof to keep the water out. They were beside themselves with joy and she sent me the cutest little thank you letter, carefully penned in crayon, and then translated, with little crayola cartoon chickens and smiling children gathered round.


There's probably folks that think I spend too much money on guns or tools. But that is something useful. I don't mind spending money for something that has a use, retains it's value and can be passed down to generations. I have a hard time spending money on just "stuff", faddy items. A woman I know came called me over when I bumped into her at a restaurant to show me her latest acquisition. A $500 designer purse. She has about 100 purses, (I'm not kidding) but this one was special because well. . . . .it was $500! I tried to act pleased for her, but it was as foreign an expenditure to me as taking $100 bills and flinging them out the airplane window.

I don't have a $500 purse. This years entire wardrobe cost less than that. But I have friends that would take a bullet for me. I have the openness of the horizon, and the strength of my character. I have freedom and I have balance and I have friends that totally understand this.

We wake to time's incessant alarm, casting ourselves onto shores of time unaccounted for, rushing headlong from those nights of God's silence to days of great discovery. We can stay in and safe, intact for one slow, sure, unremarkable day, gathering useless possessions and people around us. Or we can cast off our fear and break our necks for home, glory and freedom. If we occasionally end up bruised, or crying inside, who is to say the consequences weren't worth it?


What is ahead is unknown, you can treat it with fear, no different than standing on the edge of a cliff, dreading that feeling as the ground falls away, the tiny rocks clamoring down like the first throw of dirt on a pine box. Or you can treat it as perceived feast, like a wafer on the tongue. A leap of faith for all you believe in, a willful jump into a place free of time and regret, where all the names and the faces of those you love surround you, as all around you, the wild things that call to you, run on ahead of soundless guns.

I know where my home is at, and it's not four walls. I know who my friends are and they could care less that I don't have designer clothing or fancy surroundings. And looking at a dusty framed photo of a young man in uniform on my desk and a small crayoned note on my fridge, I know I have the comfort of a life, in which, if only for a moment, I meant the absolute world to someone. That is something you can never buy, like the heat of a candle that warms me from the inside out.