"Help the Homeless!"

Often when walking in downtown Chicago I hear someone on the ground with a plastic cup calling out, "Help the Homeless!" This bugs me, not because someone is asking me for money, or that there are so many men and women on the street asking for money, but because they are asking for money in the third person.

What this tells me is that our society has minimized them and looks down on them as homeless. Perhaps they're on the street because they lost their job, lost their home, lost their family, or have lost precious years of their life due to an addiction to drugs or alcohol. But in today's society, all this seems to add up to the idea that the homeless have lost both their identity and their dignity. They are outcasts seeking the means to live day to day. And so when they ask for money, they ask for money in the third person. They are set apart from our society in the same way that lepers were forced to live on the outskirts of town during Jesus' lifetime.

It is doubly sad that the homeless today have accepted the position of second class citizens we have given them. We treat them like they don't have an identity so they have accepted that they don't have an identity. And that's the worse part.

The truth is that inside all of us is someone who is homeless. Someone who is not sure of who he is and where he's going. The most intimate request we can make to God or even to a friend is to admit our weakness and ask for help, but it's hard. It takes courage to be naked and vulnerable and say: "I'm unemployed, can you help me?" "I'm going to lose my house, can you help me?" "I haven't had anything to eat today, can you help me?"

Asking for help from another forces us to be in relationship. We admit that we are powerless to continue living on our own. More than a meal, shelter, or a job, our deepest desire is to be relationship, whether that is with a neighbor or with almighty God.

Viktor Frankl, is his book, Man's Search for Meaning, suggests, "He who has a WHY to live can bear almost any HOW." For Frankl as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps, his WHY was the hope of seeing his wife again and basked in the memory of their loving relationship while in reality, torture, starvation, and death flourished all around him.

So when we see someone on the street calling out and saying, "Help the Homeless," our response needs to be more than to give them a buck or some loose change. We need to challenge ourselves to look them in the eye, shake their hand, ask them their name and tell them yours. We need to challenge ourselves to treat them with dignity and be in relationship with them.

In doing so, we become the WHY that Frankl talks about. We give that man or woman on the street hope not only that they can get something to eat or find a room to sleep in, we give them hope that they are important, significant, and beloved.