Love, Truth and Righteousness - what I learned when I was homeless

Liberals and Conservatives have different strengths when it comes to the three Christian virtues

Being homeless wasn’t the most challenging thing I’ve experienced, but it was pretty challenging. As my seasonal job approached a long break period, I faced the possibility of months with no income. I applied to countless jobs but didn’t find one. I realized I would not have income to pay rent the next month.

The family I rented a room from depended on my rent payment to make their rent payment. So I couldn’t ask them to wait until I found a job and let me catch up on rent later. I had to move out right away so they could find another renter before their rent was due.

I took what money I had and rented a storage unit, bought a gym membership and purchased a tent. I was aware of the rows of tents in the city, so I figured I’d join them until I found income again. But after a few days on the downtown streets, I realized a person would have to give up any normal sense of self-preservation to fall asleep there. After searching for possible solutions on the internet, I read stories of people finding forest areas in the riverbed sections of the city to pitch their tents. I was lucky to find such a spot, and was very lucky to continue there undisturbed for the next six months.

That would only be the first of three or four time periods I was homeless. But it was the longest of them. I can’t say enough about the individuals who helped me get food & shelter, and members of a Presbyterian church who helped me get around at that time. Maybe I’ll write more about the many Good Samaritans in my life another time. For the purpose of this essay and conveying the lesson I learned, I’m going to write about the response I got from churches at the beginning of that six month period with those who saved my life at the end of it.

A typical day consisted of getting up while it was still dark and making my way to the gym to shower before going about my day looking for a job or completing the tasks that consume so much more time while homeless. My day typically ended working on a computer in a public library until it closed. Then I made my way back to the tent well after dark.

Two months went by, and still no luck finding a job. I started contacting churches and asking for help to get back into a room so I could more easily look for a job. I contacted churches I had given years of service to back home. They told me to get help from a church in my new city. I contacted multiple large affluent evangelical churches. They all told me to get help from a homeless charity. I contacted all that I could find. But there were none that could help me. Most that I found required their clients to have specific problems that I did not have, or to meet certain demographic markers that I did not meet. The only one I found open to just any homeless adult had a very long wait list.

So I continued in the tent in the woods. After three months, I got a part-time valet parking job. The new income provided a little more stability, but wasn’t enough to rent a room. By month five, my seasonal job came back, but it was too seasonal and intermittent to catch up on finances and get a new rental right away. By winter, I was still in the tent. Up to that point, it wasn’t that bad. But things would get bad very quickly.

For one, other people started finding my tent and poking around. I hadn’t realized how miraculous it was to find a place to pitch a tent, even a secluded area in the woods, and not be intruded upon by other homeless people - for even a couple days, much less six months.

I moved locations and set up my tent in a new place. There was something I didn’t realize as I was crawling around anchoring my tent down. I was crawling around in poison oak stems and leaves. I came down with poison oak rashes on my arms and legs, and that same day it started raining. Water got inside my tent, partially submerging my legs, as I slept at night. That is also the time of year it can get cold at night. There were many nights I couldn’t stop shivering.

I think all of these conditions came together to aggravate my poison oak rashes and it was very hard to stop scratching them. A week later, both forearms and both lower leg areas were quite swollen. The color and texture of my skin had changed and fluid was leaking out. Every step I took became excruciating to my lower legs.

A short time later, I found a religious shelter network that only helps homeless people in the winter. And unlike the other year-round organizations that only helped people with certain problems, this one only helped people that did not have those problems. So I started the process of applying to get in.

In the meantime, I realized I needed medical assistance for my limbs and went to an inner-city urgent care clinic. The doctor there told me I may need to have my limbs amputated and encouraged me to be hospitalized at the major university hospital in the area. I had a bad sense about her. And I had already developed a healthy distrust of the medical system. So I did not take her advice. I went to another urgent care clinic in more of a suburban area, and that doctor prescribed medications the first doctor hadn’t. I took them, and eventually my arms and legs returned to normal.

But I’m not sure I would have recovered if this network of churches I applied to had not taken me in. The winter rain season was underway and as I mentioned, it can get very cold at night. After being approved by a Catholic charity, a small inner-city African American church took me in and gave me a cot to sleep on inside a warm building at night, along with two hot meals a day. I don’t know how much longer I could have lasted outside. (I later returned to my tent site and found my tent submerged under several feet of water. The whole river bed had flooded just after I got into the shelter.)

By the end of my two weeks in that first church, I was able to walk without much pain. Every two weeks for the next few months the small group of homeless people I was with moved to another church that was part of the shelter network. After working a couple months while staying at these church shelters, I was able to rent a room again.

I couldn’t help but notice the churches that gave me food and shelter were relatively smaller, poorer and more liberal than the churches I have gone to all my life, and the churches who declined my requests for help several months earlier. I probably have serious disagreements with these liberal churches that helped me about matters of truth and righteousness. Of course, we never talked about such matters while they were demonstrating a tremendous act of love toward me.

It’s not that anyone owed me anything. It’s not that I deserved help. The churches that declined to help me may have done nothing wrong. That is between them and God. And I’m sure the vast majority of individuals I asked for help would not be able to help another person pay rent, even if they were willing to, any more than I am able to help another person pay rent.

But the love one group of liberal Christians chose to give me, and the love another group of conservative Christians chose not to, contrasts them with each other in a way I may have been missing before. I always had a tendency to compare churches in how Gospel-centered they are, how focused they are on practicing and preaching biblical truth and righteousness.

But I didn’t quite realize how weak some churches are, when it comes to sharing God’s love with the poor. I had participated in many ministries to the homeless, refugees and the poor with conservative evangelical churches, and poured my life into serving youth, many of whom did not have families to show love to them. But seeing a church bringing homeless people inside their doors and letting them sleep in their building - feeding them, not one night a week, but two meals a day - expanded my idea of what it can mean for a church to love the poor.

I had made it clear to the churches I first asked for help I was a conservative Evangelical Protestant Bible college graduate - I was one of them. But it wasn’t until I went to a Catholic charity and a network of liberal inner city churches that any church helped me get the shelter I needed. I realized that conservative churches might learn something about love from liberal churches, just as I know liberal churches have a lot to learn about truth and righteousness.

This realization brought back to mind a mission I believed God gave me a decade before - to propagate the message from the biblical book of 1 John that there are not one, not two, but three key virtues in the Christian life: Love, Truth and Righteousness. (see 1 John 4:7, 1 John 1:8, 1 John 5:18)

I sensed a call from God to write a Bible study guide for the book of 1 John and to lead Bible studies on the book. I never got around to writing the study guide but I did lead a study on the book once. Then circumstances prevented me from continuing…

What had moved inside of me was the need I saw for the church in my home city to hear the message that all three of these virtues are equally important in the Christian life. Some Christians have a way of picking and choosing which Bible verses they like and which they don’t. I noticed a growing sentiment influencing many Christians that love is the only thing that really matters, and that it’s ok to sacrifice truth and righteousness for its sake.

A decade later, while laying on a cot in an inner city church in my new city, I realized the reverse is also true, many of us Christians sometimes sacrifice love for the sake of truth and righteousness. Of course, there are many perversions and misinterpretations of what it means to show Christian love, which is one reason it’s so important for churches to be solid on truth and righteousness. But if the Scripture makes anything clear, it is the priority of Jesus to help the poor and show love to the lowest classes of people.

I don’t mean to place absolute labels on anyone, just making comparisons about general strengths and weaknesses. The strength of liberal churches tends to be love. The strengths of conservative churches tend to be truth and righteousness. There’s always exceptions. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn in heaven that the most loving church to ever exist was a fundamentalist Baptist church in a rural area, maybe in Kentucky. I would bet on it.

I just realized something else the other day with the spiritual revival that just started in Kentucky. There are news reports of people experiencing a change of heart, a filling of God’s Holy Spirit, a release of negative emotion, and positive anticipation for the experience to spread to others. Sounds like a good thing right? People experiencing the revival have quoted Scripture to relate to what they see happening in themselves and other people.

Then I noticed the naysayers, the kind of people who join a social media group about Christian community just to argue about theology, put down the experience these people are having and accuse them of misinterpreting Scripture. I realized it is also possible to err on the side of truth at the cost of righteousness. And that’s what revivals are all about. They are revivals of righteousness.

So the encouragement I want to leave here is that the Christian life is about all three of these virtues from 1 John: Love, Truth and Righteousness. We should be equally passionate about all of them and all of our lives seek to pursue each at the same time. I know I still have a lot to learn about all three.