Collecting Stuff

If you haven't seen it for yourself then you've seen pictures of it. A homeless person is pushing a grocery cart that is packed to the point of overflowing, full of stuff. His stuff! Her stuff! They do not have a home but they have stuff.

I can walk into the Grace House dorm right now, as I have done a thousand times before, and be absolutely amazed at how much stuff a homeless man can have.

"You got too much stuff to be homeless!" I once told a room full of homeless men.

Of course they looked at me like I was an idiot. They do not have a home, a family, a significant other, or much of a significant anything. They no longer have hope, desire or much dignity left. So they buy, find, or collect stuff. And their stuff is what they hold on to when they no longer have these other things.

There was this homeless guy that I was working with many years ago. Cliff came in off the streets and we slowly brought him along. An addict, he had lived on the streets for years. He regained his dignity. He rediscovered hope. He got a job and was very excited when he got his first pay check, but he was even more excited a week later when the package that he had ordered arrived. It was from the Hair Club for Men! He had spent his entire first paycheck on the desire for more hair!

But I learned something then. Homeless people want the same things that the rest of us want. They want a nice home and good friends. They want to feel better about themselves. They want to be healthy. They want to be valued. They want better hair. These desires are no different from you and me.

Yet, when people live in poverty for years, they have a tendency to find their value in the stuff that they have. This reinforces stereotypes that the rest of of us have about poor people. So what if a family has amassed three different television sets in the first apartment that they have ever lived. Julie and I have three televisions in our house! (We used to have five but we have downsized!).

But when a poor person has three televisions, it means something different. It means they are wasteful or make poor decisions. But what they are really trying to find is worth. Because they don't feel like they have any.

Hopefully, one day they will discover, like I hope that all of us discover, that it is not what we have that gives us worth. It is who we are.