Living to Fight Another Day

I've been sick for most of this week. I only get sick when I start wearing out. I can always tell because my lower back starts to ache first and then there comes the fever. I spent most of Sunday and Monday sleeping until the fever broke. Then it was cautiously back to work because this is the Christmas season and that is a very busy time at Union Mission.

Tuesday I did pretty good throughout the morning attending a Step Up Executive Committee Meeting, attending the ground breaking of America's Second Harvest new community kitchen, and then the final walk through of the Dutchtown development, ending with a lunch meeting with Lavanda Brown and Slip Eloge. Then it was home to bed.

Wednesday I flew to Atlanta for the Interagency Council for the Homeless meeting and spent the late afternoon and evening coughing and hacking in the hotel room with my sick wife who joined me and complimented by coughing and hacking with her own.

After making it back to Savannah yesterday, Keller Deal and I planned the next Union Mission IMPACT television show, plan mass mailings, and a lot of other things that are all happening at once.

This morning is the first day that I have run since last Sunday when I got my first clue that the sickness was coming. As I made by way down the street I noticed the gold leaves that lined the street and the bright red roses that grew in yards that I passed. The white sand was soft as I ran through an opening in the dunes and spilled out onto the grey sand of beach. The ocean was flat and the yellow rising sun was suspended between the sea and a string of purple and red clouds. The wind was lite though the air was cold.

Throughout the run I coughed and spit the mucus which is the last of the sickness working itself out of my body. My chest hurt with each cough and when I finished my frozen hands wiped excess sweat from my forehead.

Through the years I have learned that this work can take its toil on me. Never really off, my body finally tells me when it is time to slow down and rest. Obviously I don't do as good a job telling myself so my body takes over. And that is one of the things that I have come to respect about the work, from time to time you just have to step away from it or it will consume you completely.

Way back a thousand years ago when I started working with homeless people, I got to know Mitch Synder who was also doing the work in Washington, D. C. Mitch always wore an army jacket because he felt that he was at war with the Reagan administration over homelessness. He opened up a massive shelter in D. C. hailed at the time as a national victory in the war on homelessness. It is still operating though I think that it is a mass warehouse for human beings. Those days it was an intense time in an intense profession.

And then one day, Mitch hung himself in the shelter that he opened for homeless people. The work had consumed him totally, I think, with the needs of so many who pin so much of their hope on what you can do for them.

So when my lower back starts to ache, I think of Mitch. I say a prayer that he is better today than on that horrible day when he decided he had to stop once and for all. And then I lay down. Because unlike my friend Mitch, I want to live to fight another day.