My fiancée and I recently celebrated our 5th dating anniversary. Seeing as it was going to be our last ever dating anniversary (we're getting married in July), I figured we'd celebrate in style by going downtown to one of our favorite restaurants. We had 7:30 p.m. reservations and got to the parking garage across the street with about 10 minutes to spare. Everything was going according to plan.
What I didn't plan for was being approached by a homeless man who told us he had just tried to buy a chicken sandwich only to be told it was $7.49. He said it again to make his point, half yelling this time in frustrated astonishment, "$7.49 for a chicken sandwich!"
Not wanting to miss our reservation and completely unprepared for this rather uncomfortable encounter, I asked if I could give him money to buy the chicken sandwich with, proceeded to hand him a $20 and walked on to my comfortable dinner.
I hope you don't think that was generous of me.
As we sat down for dinner, I realized, much to my shame, that I had just given a man money to leave me alone. There had been no compassion in that 'act of kindness,' quite the opposite in fact.
I had been indifferent, so focused on myself and on my plans for that night that I missed an opportunity to be generous with more than just money. I felt more like the priest or the Levite than the Good Samaritan, and I knew that I had failed that man.
As we waited for our food, my wonderful fiancée, Alexis, pointed out that we could have just skipped our reservation and taken the time to buy that man a sandwich instead.
We didn't, but I wish we had. He was already long gone by then.
We went on with the night as planned, but that encounter certainly got me thinking.
Homelessness is an uncomfortable thing. Uncomfortable for those of us who encounter it, sure, but far more uncomfortable for those who live in it every day.
It makes us uncomfortable because it should; it makes it difficult to ignore the fact that we live in a broken world where many things are not as they should be.
Often times it's overwhelming because we cannot possibly fathom what it's like to actually live in the conditions that homeless people live in, so we freeze up instead of acting out of the warmth of our hearts.
Who wouldn't be uncomfortable in the face of unimaginable suffering?
We walk past homeless people and try not to notice them, because if we notice them it creates tension and disrupts our relatively comfortable lives. But every time we walk by and do nothing our hearts get a little bit colder—a little bit more hardened toward the suffering around us.
Feeling uncomfortable around homelessness isn't the problem. The problem is our reluctance to surrender our own comfort, our refusal to enter into and to engage with the discomfort that we encounter. It's as if we're too busy to be distracted by compassion.
Empathizing with discomfort is one thing, but it's compassion that actually compels us to do something about it. Most of us cannot "save" homeless people from their circumstances; homelessness is often a complicated situation. But that shouldn't stop us from doing something.
Next time I encounter suffering in the form of homelessness, may it be true of me that I act in compassion and engage with the one suffering rather than walking right on by like I normally do.
May that be true of all of us.
