What if I were to visit a small homeless camp in Denver every time I feel like watching Netfix and vegging out at home in the evenings? What would come of it? Would something more come of that than the alternative of sitting on my ass for an hour or two every other night?
What if I started to care more about helping someone else with their every day struggles than I cared about my own selfish relaxation time? Is that time currently that rewarding for me as a person? What do I gain from watching Ozarks on Netflix 3 nights a week? I gain a sense of relaxation and a sense of enjoyment for a short period of time. That is about all I gain. And like so many shows out there it is touching on the darkest sides of humanity and after awhile it is really just void of life.
What if we threw some packaged travel pillows in my truck, and then took them down to a local homeless camp in Denver and started giving a few of them out at a time to complete strangers that could truly use something to rest their heads on at night. Maybe we will find a gentleman who has lost his way and has slept on the ground under the bridge every night for the past 368 days and he could really benefit from a cup of warm soup and a pillow to lay his head on instead of a shirt balled up on the cold hard concrete.
What if he were to talk about his life in the past 2 years and what caused him to lose his way and that all he had been needing for the past month was someone to listen to him and listen to his story in a posture of caring because we all want someone to care about us and our stories. None of us are that far from being homeless when you think about it..... We are all just human beings with dreams and goals and the possibility of hope and the possibility of despair.
We are not all given equal hands in life, but we all go through trials and tribulations, we all go through horrible life experiences that test us to our very core. In the end, it is about the help we get along the way, whether requested or unrequested, and it is of course about how we respond to that help and how we decide to take on the biggest challenges we are given. No matter how lonely it can get, no human being has to be alone in their suffering and none should be alone.
On the other side of things, we could all benefit from helping to open the eyes of those who have lost sight of the hope in their lives. We could all benefit from getting off of our warm couches and walking out into the urban wilderness to find those who could use some help in the smallest of ways. And most likely the first couple times that you engage in conversation or attempt to help, it will seem extremely trivial to you, like you could have stayed at home and nobody would be the worser for it. But that third or fourth or fifth night that you go out, you start to become braver, and you start to realize that it takes bravery and relentlessness at times to truly prove to people that there is meaning behind your words, and that there is hope behind your eyes.
So go out, get off your couch, go out into the wilderness -- and if it happens to be snowing or freezing outside all the better, for you know that there are homeless in need of warmth and maybe just someone to listen.
