Maybe you just turned 18 and anything is better than staying with your abusive parents. Maybe you owe three months in back rent because you haven’t been able to find a job and your landlord tells you you have to leave. The circumstances vary.
You have nowhere to go, no money to fall back on, no one in the world to help you. You might walk around during the day, hanging out around town. You look around and see that these people walking past you are living in a different world than you. You have nothing in common with them. A deep loneliness sets itself in your heart. Slowly it turns to despair, poisoning your mind and consuming it like a disease.
But your mind gets away from you. What if you are woken up by a cop kicking you to your feet? How are you going to eat? What if no one will let you use the restroom in their establishment because they can tell you’re homeless, and then you feel like an animal? What if the homeless around you get into a fight, or decide to start one with you?
And this is when it starts to hurt. The cold sets itself so deep in your bones that you can’t even remember what it feels like to be warm. Your body aches in the places the concrete presses against, and when you move your head there’s a sharp pain in your neck. There’s no easy way for you to use the bathroom, and soon the pressure in your bladder turns to pain. Your throat is dry and your lips cracked, but you can’t drink because that will make it worse. You will yourself to sleep, but are woken every 10 minutes by honking cars, bodily pain, or the deep, growling voices of others without homes taking refuge in the same place you are. You pass hours this way, praying that you’ll fall asleep and stay asleep because then you won’t feel the pain. You’re shaking so badly it leaves you breathless. It feels like your world has fallen out from under you. That’s when you realize something is missing, something you never thought about until it was gone: hope. Its absence leaves you feeling destroyed, dark, heavy. Words that don’t even make sense until they’re looming over you.
Then the thought: If there’s a God, why would He let this happen to you? If there’s a God, why doesn’t He love you? You suddenly understand why so many on the streets turn to drugs and alcohol. Where it was so easy to judge before, to write those people off as sealing their own fate, you realize you’re no different than them. You begin to think that you too would do anything to take the edge off the physical, emotion, and mental pain.
And then, you have the thought that scares you the most: It would be easier if you weren’t alive.
This is ONE NIGHT of being homeless. Two weeks ago, I got the call from the Lord to go and experience it for myself. I’ll write something about my experience another day, but the past 8 hours have left me forever changed. I asked God to give me a place of intercession through the experience, and at times I felt like he transported me to someone else’s mind. I wanted to take you there as well, as best I could.
