‘Casey’ was a tradesman who moved to Oceanside in November from out-of-province and found a camping spot at Rathtrevor. He told me, ‘This is home. I grew up in Parksville as a kid and now I’m moving back to be closer to family.” But his family was skeptical. Casey had used drugs, abused alcohol, drifted, lost jobs, and become homeless. Casey’s trade was as a bricklayer and carpenter. He’d been ‘dry’ for a couple of months and was now trying to start on a new path.
Manna was able to help provide some articles for his campsite – camp stove, fuel, flashlight, sleeping bag, tarp, mattress, and we even had a frying pan to give him along with cans of stew and soup. I spent about an hour talking with Casey encouraging him to keep going on this new path of courage and I hoped to see him again at the Soup Kitchen. Sadly, he never showed. When I went back to his campsite, his tent was gone with all his stuff. I haven’t seen Casey since the end of November.
I’m not sure what happened to him. I just know that sometimes the challenge to change is overwhelming. It isn’t easy ‘going clean’. “Just get clean,” we hear so many say. It’s not like changing socks. Getting clean means a shift in identity; it means confronting the ‘voices’; it means confronting the internal chaos once the external chaos is controlled; and it means becoming vulnerable and saying “I need your help.” Homeless people often ‘take’ our stuff – the food, clothing, sleeping bag, tarp – we offer, not because they ‘need help’ but because they are in crises and chaos – they are in ‘survival mode.’
When you see piles of stuff on shopping carts or piles of stuff beside the road – you see someone who is suffering, often lonely, always fearful, in chaos, usually with mental health concerns around addictive issues, often physically sick with untreated wounds, and always with a poor self-image – feeling unloved, unnoticed, unwelcome, and forgotten.
We can help! We don’t need to ‘save the world’ – we just need to show honour, respect, acceptance, love, and compassion to someone when they welcome us into their life, trust us with their story, and allow us to comfort them so they can find the courage to live freed from the chaos that controls them and more with the Peace and Love that God can provide.