This story is from the early days of doing what eventually became Socks and Gloves. Telling (or hearing someone else tell) this story always does two things to me: makes me start cracking up, and makes me blush. It's funny, but I also come off like an idiot. Oh, well.
A group of us decided that we needed to start doing something to help the homeless in Sacramento. We put together care packs and handed them out every few months. Eventually we added socks, gloves, blankets, hot chocolate, and what-have-you, and went to a monthly schedule, put up a website, started a blog.
But this story is from one of our first outings. We were handing out bags with care packs inside - soap, toothbrushes, granola bars, etc. None of had any idea where to go find groups of homeless people, and we hadn't thought about it much. I think we figured that you see enough homeless people around that we wouldn't have any trouble handing out thirty bags. Wrong! Just randomly driving around Midtown Sacramento, you aren't easily going to find that many homeless people - you have to know where they're at. Currently, we can usually give away things to thirty homeless people in an hour or less, but back then it would take us several hours because we really didn't know what we were doing.
Toward the end of the outing in question, we still had six or seven bags left that we were having trouble giving away - we just couldn't find anybody else. As we were driving under a freeway overpass we saw a homeless guy on our right. I shouted at Dan, who was driving, "There's one! Pull over!" As Dan squealed to a halt, I leaped out of the car with a bag in hand and started to say to the guy "here's a bag with..." but he immediately turned around and started running away in sheer terror.
Okay, ha ha, kind of funny, mostly lame that we scared the guy that bad. But that's not the really embarrassing part. The embarrassing part is that I started chasing the guy down the street, holding up the care pack and screaming "I have a bag! With stuff in it! For you!". Oddly enough, this behavior was not quite non-threatening enough to get him to stop sprinting away, so, after about a half a block, I abandoned pursuit.
As I'm typing this in the coffee shop, I'm kind of giggling and blushing. Never fails.
The good news is that we've learned a ton since then - we have a much better idea of where to find homeless people to give things too, and we've also figured out better ways to approach them so that we respect them instead of just scaring them to death. Hopefully, our enthusiasm is still just as high, though.
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2 comments:
"I have a bag".
I love the story. I too remember our 2nd Turkey in the Park at Discovery Park and trying to find people to make it way out to that park. I was driving around and then I'd pull over, jump out of the truck and invite people. Needless to say, nobody that I invited in that way came. I wouldn't have, so why should they.
Ryan
This is still one of my favorite stories about how we learned this ministry by doing it. Having seen it first hand, I can honestly say this is only one of many episodes like it. In the early days I used to wake up the sleeping homeless to give them things. It wasn't until I roused someone who had become my friend that I learned he had PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). He woke up swinging and one of my other street friends held him back and calmed him down. After my initial fear, I realized that my actions were not only stupid but also unkind.
Ann
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