Chicken soup for a complex problem, homelessness

Maybe you're like I was at a time in my life when I thought the homeless people received enough help so they didn't need me. I was actually afraid of them when I was walking around. My excuse, well I was just a teenager at the time. When I grew up, my attitude did too.

I started to see them as people that once had families and friends, jobs, places to live and bank accounts. After all, my father did. He was a Korean War veteran and 100% disabled. He was also an alcoholic. My father never ended up homeless but spent about a year in a project living in a tiny apartment. Because of him, I understood how families could turn their backs on one of their own. Having a parent come home drunk with half the neighborhood talking about him was not something to be proud of. There were constant fist fights and shouting matches. He stopped drinking when I was 13 and joined AA. My parents separation ended and he moved back home.

His alcoholism and recovery changed my mind about homeless people. I understood that my father could have been one of them. Then as I grew older, they captured my heart.

It was not until my husband's PTSD got so bad that I was considering sending him to the homeless shelter in Boston that my eyes were fully opened. Homeless veterans also walk the streets with all the others. Imagine being willing to lay down your life for the sake of the other people in the country only to be left abandoned by them, homeless and walking the streets for the rest of you life. Fighting for a bed to sleep in or someplace out of the snow, rain and freezing temperatures. Wondering when you'll eat next or when you have taken your last chance. While all homeless people mattered to me, the veterans being homeless broke my heart. Considering I almost had two of them in my own life, it isn't hard to understand why that is.

Some use drugs and alcohol to the point where their lives fall apart but others see hard times come into their lives and they cannot cope with them. There are as many reasons for homeless people as there are homeless people. Some never had a close family to take care of them. Some have mental illness and there are no jobs for them even if they could work.

What really go to me is that there is the most famous homeless person in the history of mankind. His name is Jesus. Remember He didn't really have a home to go to at the end of working a long day spreading the word of God. He didn't have a stock of food to eat whenever He wanted to or clothes in suitcases. He had to rely on the kindness of strangers to take care of His needs. His Disciples gave up their homes, families and livelihoods to follow Him. They were taken care of by the people in the towns they traveled to. No one asked them why they didn't have a place to live. No one asked them why they couldn't find real jobs to take care of their own needs. No one judged them. They just took care of them.

Think about it the next time you find nothing wrong with homeless people walking our streets with not enough people to take care of them, feed them, shelter them and clothe them.

Senior Chaplain Kathie "Costos" DiCesare
International Fellowship of Chaplains
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
www.youtube.com/NamGuardianAngel
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington

Chicken soup for a complex problem

By Cristina Silva and Austin Bogues, Times Staff Writers
In print: Sunday, November 30, 2008

Laura Lanciotti was hooked on cocaine and liquor, unemployed and living under a highway overpass in downtown St. Petersburg when advocates for the homeless told her about Pinellas Hope.

She moved into the outdoor tent shelter in unincorporated Pinellas County in October, quit the booze and drugs and got a job as a security guard at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa.

Pinellas Hope "helped me put my life back together," said Lanciotti, 55.

Once regarded as an experimental, quick fix to the area's growing homeless problem, Pinellas Hope has quickly become Pinellas County's leading social service provider since the shelter opened 12 months ago.
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