Each story I hear when I meet with groups of homeless men and women makes me curious about the people I see walking on the street with their duffel bags or shopping carts. Before, they blended in to the sea of people, now I notice them. What’s her story, the woman who looks like she’s on her way to work at a restaurant? Or the man in rags? Homeless people are slowly becoming people to me, not just “the homeless”.
After just an hour-long meeting at a homeless shelter with parents who live there with their families, I was in tears as I drove home. Their stories echoed in my heart. The car that was stolen then totaled so the family couldn’t move out of state where they had jobs waiting for them. The man whose head injury from a fall meant he couldn’t work and his wife’s minimum wage job is the only income for their family of five.
Also echoing in my mind are unanswerable questions of why them and why not me? Is it karma or luck? We all make choices but what’s most inexplicable are things we have no control over: what just happens to us, the families we are born into, our race, our gender, the economy, the country where we are born, the neighborhood we are raised in.
I’ve never known homelessness personally but I am learning, story by story, of others’ realities. And hard as it is to sit with suffering when there is nothing I can do to help, I feel I am being given a gift of becoming more human.
I am grateful to all the people—homeless, homeowners, and renters—who talk to me about money in their lives. They help me to feel and see the parameters and biases of my particular experiences (being white and privileged). I own a home because I inherited enough money when my mother died for a down payment. And I appreciate having a home now more than ever before.
What stories do you tell yourself about why you have the financial resources or the debt you have? I find that when we share our money worries, dilemmas, fears and/or shame, the grip (or for some of us, the stranglehold) of money loosens and lessens. We are better able to deal with money and perhaps experience more freedom in relation to it and in other areas of our lives.
Published 10/13/16
