love and the streets
My team and I don’t venture out of our neighborhood very often on family nights, mainly because there are too many great things going on in Little Village to have a reason to leave. Two of the nights that we did venture downtown back in the fall taught me two of the most simple, but important lessons I have learned in Mission Year thus far.
The first evening we were walking towards the John Hancock building to go look at the city lights at night, when, as we were passing a Walgreens, I heard a voice among the crowds ask, “can someone please give us some food?” When I turned to look where the voice had come from, I was face to face with a young woman and three children. She was gracious with us as we tried to decide how we could best get food for the family, and finally, at the delight of the kids, agreed the McDonalds a few blocks away would be our best bet. So we set off with “Betty” and her three kids to find the restaurant. As we walked down the streets the three boys did flips, falling in front of busy pedestrians, and laughing hysterically at each other’s antics. There was an energy that came off of them that was contagious and despite awkward glances from strangers around us, we couldn’t help but have fun with them! When we reached the McDonald’s we let the boys order their food and all set down at a large table to share in a meal together. The boys on our team proceeded to play games with the boys while Emily, Kristin, and I were able to talk to Betty about her life, what had gotten them to that corner downtown, and what the future looked like. We began to unravel a story that involved missing parents, an overcrowded home, and Betty, barely an adult herself, taking care of kids that we never did figure out belonged to whom in the family. After being there long enough to be asked to quiet down and behave by the security guard three times, we decided we should all probably head for the train stop.
As we continued to talk walking down the street, I could not help but feel like the night had been a great lesson about the kingdom. The whole interaction was messy and at any moment the awkwardness, or social “unacceptability”, of the situation was constantly being thrown back in our face by the stares of on looking strangers or security guards. The cool part though was that when you consider what Christ did throughout the Gospels by eating with tax collectors or conversing with prostitutes it becomes completely clear that we should be having dinner with more Betty’s. The dinner we shared with Betty and her family was quite possibly one of the most treasured moments I will take away from Mission Year because in that evening I learned what it means to look past the outer disguise of the people we encounter here and into the greatness of who God created in each person.
The second evening came about a month later when we were once again passing a Walgreens and once again heard the voice of someone asking for money. It may sound harsh, but there is no way that we could or should give out money to everyone that asks for money on the streets, but by stopping and acknowledging someone you often are giving them more than the person who walks by and drops change in without ever looking the person in the eyes. What stopped us in our tracks this time though was the fact that “Rita” actually said “please don’t just walk by me and ignore me like everyone else.” You very rarely here someone say that. So we stopped and started talking to her. Soon after we stopped, the cops came patrolling by and Rita grabbed us by the arms, shepherding us down the street telling us to “play it cool” and that “they were looking for a reason to arrest her.” It was at this point that Rita told us that she had recently been let out of prison on parole and that her aunt that she had lived with before being put in prison had died and the people living in the house now were not people she should be hanging out with. She told us that if she went back to that house it would guarantee her going back to prison because there was too much drug activity and the people in the house would put it all on her since she already had a record. We asked to pray with her and held hands on that street corner lifting Rita’s needs up to God. Rita thanked us and told us how grateful she was we had come along. She told us that before we had stopped she had planned to just go get a gun and start holding people up (we later found out that that was exactly what had landed her in prison in the first place; holding up an undercover cop).
Unlike with Betty and her three kids, this situation had some seriously tense and slightly frightening overtones to it. In the heat of the moment none of us knew the best next step. Some of us wanted to bring Rita along with us for dinner. Some of us felt it was probably best to say our goodbyes. So we went to dinner with Rita down the street and the events that unfolded throughout the rest of the evening still leave me thinking, “How would Jesus have responded?” There sitting across from me was an obviously very broken woman who needed to be loved, needed to know she was more than what life had dealt her and yet we were stuck in the middle of an intense spiritual fight. Rita had singled out a couple of our roommates, one in particular, and had started harassing them with her “insights” about our roommate. She said what I can only describe as some of the most intense spiritual warfare targeted at someone I have seen happen. Our two roommates excused themselves from the table after staying as long as they could, and the three of us left, tried to do what we could to leave Rita with contacts for places we knew that would offer her assistance. We said our goodbyes that night on Michigan Ave. and I couldn’t help but ride home on the train in shock at what had just happened that night.
There is no foolproof method of how to love someone and for that I try to be grateful. In moments like that night with Rita, who knows what the best thing was to do except show her love the best way we knew how.
The interesting struggle that night was how do you best love somebody without it hurting someone else? In staying with Rita, we opened one of our roommates up to being hurt pretty badly. I don’t pretend to know the answer to this still, but it has made me keenly aware in all situations now of the spiritual battle that often takes place in a simple act of showing love to someone and the full intensity of what is really going on when we place ourselves in the middle of those fights. Sometimes we get burned, sometimes someone we love gets burned, but I know and trust that God is bigger than those burns and that the love shown to people like Rita has great value.
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