Trivia question: Who was Yogi Berra’s roommate throughout much of his baseball career? No? The answer is Bobby Brown, who after his time as an infielder became a cardiologist. The story goes that one night Berra and Brown were up late reading, because that was what people did back then. Berra was reading a comic book and Brown a medical textbook. They finished reading around the same time and Berra, closing his book, turned to Brown and said, “How did your book turn out?”
The story is amusing, but it does show one serious point: Each of us sees a different horizon, and what makes total sense to one person may be incomprehensible to another. Of course, we are all trying to be happy, but too often, the culture around us has conflated happiness with money and achievement. For instance, one of the advertisements for the PrEP medication, which prevents HIV, reads “Health=Wealth.” In other words, take care of your body so you can make more money.
Now, when people first walk inside LTM, they often assume that we are somehow beyond money and achievement. Some folks, for instance, are shocked when they find out I am a paid employee. They assume I must have all my weekday mornings free and be volunteering my time because my heart is just gushing. More often, volunteers make judgments about our guests like “They’re all homeless,” “They don’t work,” and “These poor people have nothing.” That’s not true. At least a quarter of our guests have an apartment, quite a few of them work, and most of the others get some kind of fixed income. Once volunteers learn that those assumptions are incorrect, they move on to a set of questions. “Why?” they ask, or “What’s his story? What is so-and-so doing with all those donations?” or “She seems so together. Why is she homeless?”
It is only natural for people to be curious about the folks they are working with, so instead of saying, “Mind your own business,” I say, “We don’t care about that. We don’t care what someone's story is, or what they do with their money, or whether they will ever ‘get it together.’”
At LTM, we pride ourselves on welcoming everyone. No matter where you’re coming from, no matter where you’re going. No matter what horizon you see. But that’s harder than it looks when someone’s horizon collides with someone else’s. When someone has their favorite seat that’s also someone else's favorite seat. When someone hasn’t showered in weeks and the whole room can tell. When some people yearn for privacy and others for community, when some people want to talk quietly and others want to blast music. Sometimes when an argument isn’t going well, which is most of the time, I just tell folks to knock it off.
Welcoming everyone does not mean allowing people to scream at each other.
When your day—or your week, or your life—is not going well, your perspective becomes smaller. In fact, the tougher your situation is, the more tempting it is to put others down. Many of the harshest judgments about LTM’s guests come from other guests. If I had a dollar for every time a guest talked about “these crazy people” or “these guys that don’t want to work,” I could retire today.
This is the part of the speech when I usually say something nice about LTM. How vast our embrace of welcome is, no matter how shorthanded our kitchen—and unless I am on vacation, our kitchen is always shorthanded. But the fact is that no pithy platitude can sum up what we do. The challenge of allowing a room full of very different people to be themselves does not ever get easier. If anything, as our attendance continues to rise, it is getting harder.
The most comforting statement I can make concerns the idea of the kingdom of God. This idea gets described many different ways in the Bible, and has been interpreted many ways over the years. Is the kingdom something in the future that we can’t even imagine, or is it present and urgent among us now? The questions of which horizon we see, how the book turns out, and whether we will make it into housing may sometimes be important, but having a place to be yourself and be with your community is always important. That is the main thing I have learned at LTM. What we do now matters. Whether we are happy now matters. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Now.
Comments