It doesn’t happen with every place, but there are those certain environments that leave you marinating in their odor for hours. Some people like it, and some people don’t. But apparently enough people like it at Burger King that the restaurant giant is working on the patent for a new cologne. Soon you can pay to smell like you’ve had it your way – flame-broiled and smothered in condiments – without actually having to ingest the calories. Crazy.
Well, I’m proud to say that although I won’t be participating in the BK Au De Toilet anytime soon, my good winter jacket is still sitting in the garage because it reeks of my encounter with Atlanta. It obviously doesn’t smell all that great, but I’m thankful for it all the same, because it is truly the smell of a life-changing experience.
If you’ve ever spent any time working with the homeless population in any city, you know that it is an experience that will assault your senses. The smells are usually the most overwhelming to me. I don’t know what it is or exactly how to describe it, but it’s a heavy, strangely sweet smell that lingers in the air like a slow-moving zeppelin long after they're gone. I admit that at first it’s rather bothersome to me, but after a while you don’t even notice it that much. After a few days you don’t even realize that you’ve taken it on yourself.
The sights are definitely next in line. When you pass by the homeless on the street, you see things that impress you. Layers of clothes, maybe a backpack or a ragged sleeping bag – things that catch your attention and maybe even make you stop and think for a while. When you work with the homeless like we did, what you see leaves an impression for a lifetime.
We stayed at the SafeHouse Outreach, housed in the heart of downtown Atlanta. When we first got there those of us who were new thought our sleeping conditions were a little rough. I literally slept under a bunk bed (you think I'm kidding, but I had the bruises on my head to prove it!).
Then we took a tour of the city and saw where people who don’t even have bunk beds to sleep under lay their heads at night. Doorways and overpasses. Park benches and patches of grass. One guy we came to know sleeps under a trailer in a parking lot. Another sleeps in a chair in the lobby of an overflow shelter riddled with bedbugs and smelling of human waste. It wasn’t pretty.
It can be hard to push past what your nose smells and your eyes see, but when you do, you experience the treasure of a people who know what it’s like to cling to the Lord Jesus. With eager ears we listened to stories of real people with real lives, real pasts and very real futures. We learned that you can have a law degree and still wind up sleeping in the doorway of a church. We learned that a violent and dangerous drug dealer can be redeemed to speak the Word of God to hundreds of people every week who stand in line to call him “pastor” and ask for his guidance. We learned that not everyone on the street chose to be there, and that very few of them can even do anything about it now.
We learned that it’s a whole lot more complicated than “get a job”.
I hope I never forget the names and faces of the people we met. And I hope that I never forget that just because someone doesn’t have a home, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t just as real of a person and child of God as the next man or woman I see, and it doesn’t mean that they might not have a better relationship with the Lord than I do.
I was truly challenged by the faith of the friends we made on the streets of Atlanta. They showed me clearer than anyone ever has before that people who have nothing – literally nothing – but the Lord Jesus in their hearts, can be joyful, content and blessed.
Joyful and blessed. With little on their backs, nothing in their stomach and only the night air over their heads. Truly joyful and blessed. What a challenge this was to the recent call on my heart to learn to be content with what turns out to be a great abundance in my life. Suddenly my mind began to change – what I once saw as “needs” were being redefined as mere wants. I began to see that “need” can be a relative term in our society, and that I should take more care in how I throw that word around.
God was showing me that all anyone truly needs is Jesus. No one spoke that message from Him any clearer than a woman I’ll call Tess.
(to be continued one more time)
If you want to experience some of the sounds of our trip, check out this youtube video of Jimmy Jackson, one of the people we met downtown. He's got a gift of singing the Word!
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