full belly

Today is Mardi Gras. I am reminded that not everyone in the United States, much less the world, will go to bed tonight with a full belly. For that matter, not everyone in the world has a bed to go to, much less a roof over it.

Some years back I met a homeless man standing on the street in front of the Dallas shelter. He asked me why I was there, and when I told him we were bringing brown bag lunches for him and other temporary residents, he responded, "I help people, too. I use the experiences I had in a field hospital in Da Nang to help my brothers on the street every day."

"Until you've been without a home, you can't know how the homeless feel. If you've never been down in the trenches, you don't know what it's like to have bombs going off over your head. And until you've been hungry, I mean really hungry, not just the normal little twinge and tummy rumble at noon, it's impossible to know the true meaning of not being able to meet the most basic human needs."

Strong words? Yes, and some of the most heartfelt I'd heard in recent memory. He continued, "If you never had to rummage through garbage cans for a meal, or if you never felt the warmth of a newspaper blanket on a bitter cold night, you just don't know. It doesn't matter how many movies you see or how many books you read, until you've been-there-done-that-threw-away-the-tee-shirt, you don't have a clue."

Wondering where this diatribe might lead, and knowing that discretion is not only the better part of valor, it's also the best way to keep my nose from being broken, I backed away slightly from the bearded gentleman in his second-hand boots.

"Now you take Moses, for instance. He wasn't all that great a negotiator, because he couldn't persuade Pharaoh to let the people go. Well, at least he didn't get anywhere until Yahweh brought out the big guns. And even though Moses was willing to try, before he could try, or even understand the need to try, he had to have a change in his living circumstances. Only after he lived as one of the common people did he understand why they needed to be free. Only after he'd had his own back lashed did he say 'enough is enough, I'm done talking, bring on the frogs.'

 "You see," he warmed to his subject, "it all happened just the way it was supposed to. I figure the Children of Israel never would have listened to him if he'd still been the spoiled brat riding around on his chariot all day. And he never would have felt their pain if he'd only seen them from a position eight feet above their bent heads. But God let Moses kill the overseer so he could understand what it felt like to be hunted, on the run, and homeless. And then, to top it off, God put Moses into a desert so he'd know what it was like to be hungry. Before he could be any good for his people, Moses had to learn that it's one thing to sympathize, but another to live the nightmare."

"That's why you people try but you just don't really get it. All you know is what you read in school and what you hear in Church. You've never lived it, and all you do is give lip service to the world's problems. If you guys were more like Moses, and less afraid to dirty your hands, you might be surprised what you could accomplish."

His words came back to mind in the next few days. Do we do our good deeds armed with a want-to attitude but no real-world understanding to use for ammunition? But must we become homeless ourselves to understand their plight? Do we have to be hungry to understand the depth of emotion in the voice of the jobless woman sitting in front of us, toddlers scooting around her feet, a baby clutched firmly in her lap, as she describes her needs? Must we live through the death of a loved one to know what it's like for the new widow who finds herself standing in the middle of the floor trying to remember why she went into the room in the first place?

Was the man in the ragged camo correct in his assumption? Do we have to live in the same circumstance, as one of the cold, tired, poor, hungry, or spiritually defeated huddled masses, in order to be able to give more than lip service to their plight? Is experience really the best teacher? I was convinced the answers were, in order, no, and not necessarily. But for days afterward, I felt I was missing something, some little thing that niggled at the back of my eyelids as I drove my car to work, dressed in down coat and gloves, replete with freshly-brewed coffee and granola bar.

I turned to yet another source for inspiration. Listening to my then-teen-aged granddaughter tell the story in her own words brought a different spin to the age-old tale. "Gramma," she said, "the most important thing to remember was that at first Moses kept on saying he couldn't do it. He said he was afraid of public speaking, he said he had nobody to help him do the job, he said he had no family to look after his needs while he went out every day to be at God's business. But for every I can't that he brought up, God handed him an I can." She said more, but those were the words that still stick in my mind.

Unlike Moses, it is not a matter of what I can do, but what we together can do. In his own way, the gentleman in the tattered field jacket is as much a social worker as Moses. While Moses relieved his people from physical bondage, that Vet relieves homeless brothers from the bondage of their spirit.

And shouldn't we do the same, one hour, one person, one can of soup for the Boy Scouts, one bag of new for donation to the VA underwear, at a time?