What Difference Do It Make? (6 page)

“Once God got me out of the way,” Ashley says, “He did so much more.”

Matt not only got sober; he also began to lead the Celebrate Recovery program at the McNeeleys' home church, Bent Tree Bible Fellowship in the Dallas suburb of Carrollton, Texas. And the couple's marriage grew strong through their mutual commitment to each other and to their faith.

When Ashley read
Same Kind
at the insistence of her brother-in- law, Josh, she saw in Deborah a kindred spirit, a woman who had decided to ride out marital storms instead of abandoning ship—and who found peaceful waters on the other side. But the book also opened Ashley's eyes to a void in her life.

Her marriage was going well. She was thriving professionally. With her sister, Jesse Ihde, she had launched Minerva Consulting, a small but successful marketing and communications consulting firm. But what was she doing to help those who were hungry and homeless and hurting?

“I told my family, we need to get
involved
,” she says. “We need to make a difference! We're not doing
anything.
”

Through Josh's passion and an uncle who lives in Phoenix, Ashley learned about a program called Open Table. The nonprofit started with a group of men at a Scottsdale, Arizona, church, who worked with youth groups serving at a local homeless shelter. These men realized that their interactions at the shelter weren't really helping to break the cycle of homelessness. So they formed the group that would become Open Table, a community of mentors and life coaches who work with individuals and families, creating step-by-step economic stability and wholeness plans to help them get back on their feet.

“The goals are attained through an ongoing management process,” the Open Table Web site says, “as well as drawing on resources from the congregation, personal networks, and solutions already created by other Open Table groups.” Ashley learned that City of Phoenix officials were backing Open Table and heralding its methods as “best practices” for ending homelessness.

Ongoing management process?

Best practices?

Tackling a social issue through a carefully planned business-model approach seemed to Ashley and Jesse like an ideal fit for them. The sisters decided to launch an Open Table in the Dallas area, and they hit the ground running, creating a business plan, a marketing plan, and a prospectus. They recruited an influential advisor, made the right political connections in the city, and met with Open Table CEO Jon Katov.

Ashley had previous experience with nonprofits, having worked with Verizon on their cause-related marketing programs. She knew people on the boards of several foundations. She was certain she could tap into these connections without the slightest hiccup. “I thought,
I've done this before. Money's just going to fall into our laps, and this isn't going to be any trouble at all.
”

That's not how it went.

At first, every charity Ashley contacted expressed enthusiastic support. But the economic decline of late 2008 was taking its toll on nonprofit organizations, and enthusiasm did not translate into dollars. One by one, each of the board-member relationships Ashley had counted on to help launch Open Table failed to bear fruit. And with no money to pay for marketing and other aspects of their business plan, Ashley and Jesse were forced to shelve the project.

“I was very frustrated that I couldn't get it going,” Ashley remembers. At the same time, though, a new realization hit her like cold water in the face. “We were pursuing Open Table with a businesslike model. We had a great handle on all the statistics, the economics of the situation, the demographics. We could really rattle off the numbers about homelessness, but we didn't have heart knowledge about it.”

It became evident, Ashley says, that she and Jesse and the people they'd rallied to their cause had spent a lot of time
talking
about doing good in their community, but zero time actually
doing
anything. “We hadn't spent a single minute with people in need. Finally, we thought,
Let's just go
do
it—go serve, and let God work it out.
”

The first stop was the Union Gospel Mission, where Deborah and I first met Denver. Ashley toured the facility with Paul, a volunteer coordinator, and told him that Bent Tree Bible Fellowship would like to get involved.

“Where do you have a need?” Ashley asked.

“Well, we really need someone to hold children's church,” Paul told her. He noted that the Union Gospel Mission focused on faith-based recovery and required adult program members to attend chapel. But it was often difficult for homeless parents to get anything out of chapel because they were too distracted managing their children.

“If that's where you have a need, sign us up,” Ashley said.

“How many volunteers do you think you can get?” Paul asked.

In that moment, Ashley abandoned her business-plan/ Power Point/action-step instincts and simply jumped. “I have no idea,” she said with a grin. “But I can promise you that my husband, brother-in-law, sister, and parents will come.”

One Saturday each month, Bent Tree Bible Fellowship began holding children's church for kids aged five to fourteen. The most appealing part, says Ashley, is that the volunteers brought their own children, not to serve but just to participate—singing, doing crafts, and learning Bible stories side by side with homeless kids. “Our hope is that we're making our own kids' worlds just a little bit bigger.”

By June 2009, Bent Tree had provided so many volunteers that the Union Gospel Mission was able for the first time to open up a nursery one Saturday each month to care for children under age five. “Volunteers just kept walking in and walking in, until the coordinator said, ‘We've never had this many people before!'”

Ashley, planless and happy, just smiled. “Well, here we are!”

When Ashley was conducting her research to start Open Table, she began to understand the
metrics
of homelessness—that, yes, there are
X
number of homeless people and they're homeless for reasons
X, Y
, and
Z
.

“But I didn't recognize that these are people with
stories
and that any of us, all of us, could be there in an instant. The only way to learn that is to go do the work—to meet these people, to know them, to listen to their hearts,” Ashley says.

Since getting down to the street level on the issue, there is one point Ashley and Jesse have discussed repeatedly: once you've connected, once you've looked homelessness in the eye, once you know that hundreds of kids in your city go to sleep most nights without a roof over their heads, you have to make a choice either to do something or to consciously turn away.

“You can't forget it, so you have to make a choice,” Ashley says. “My sister and I don't think we're doing anything close to important or close to enough. But it's a start.”

8

Denver

In 1998, tired of the Park Cities, the Dallas rat race . . . we returned to Fort Worth. . . . We hadn't been in [town] for more than a few days when Deborah spied an item in the
Star-Telegram
about homelessness in the city. The piece mentioned a place called the Union Gospel Mission. At the time, an insistent voice in Deborah's heart told her it was a place she might fit . . .

“I was hoping you'd go with me,” she said, smiling and tilting her head in a way so irresistible I sometimes thought she should register it for a patent.

The mission, on East Lancaster Street, was tucked deep in a nasty part of town. While it was true that the murder rate in Texas had been falling, I was sure that anyone still doing any murdering probably lived right around there.

I smiled back. “Sure I'll go.”

But secretly, I hoped that once she actually rubbed shoulders with the kind of skuzzy derelicts that had robbed my gallery, Deborah would find it too scary, too real, to volunteer on East Lancaster . . .

I should've known better . . .

That night, she dreamed about the mission . . . and this time, about a man.

“It was like that verse in Ecclesiastes,” she told me the next morning over breakfast. “A wise man who changes the city. I saw him . . . I saw his face.”

I
remember when Mr. Ron and Miss Debbie started comin down to the mission. This couple was dressed real nice—not fancy or nothin like that but nice enough to make a lot of us wonder if Mr. Ron was the law.

Funny thing about it was, they started comin one Tuesday and never did stop. Now, we was used to some groups comin ever now and then, or maybe on the holidays, like Thanksgivin or Christmas. Ain't nothin wrong with that, 'cept it makes the homeless feel like they ain't nobody special unless it's some kinda special day.

I can't blame nobody for just comin on the holidays 'cause most folks work, and they can't do nothin but come when it's a vacation day or maybe on the weekends. I can't sling no mud about that 'cause I 'xpect most people doin all they can do. 'Course, if that ain't true, maybe they need to think about that.

Them's the folks I scratch my head about. I just can't figure out why folks go all year without reachin out to help a brother or a sister 'cept on Thanksgivin or Christmas or Easter. It's almost like a light goes on, a lit-up sign in their mind that says, “It's Thanksgivin. I'm gon' serve God,” or “It's Christmas. I'm gon' serve God.”

What about when it ain't Thanksgivin or Christmas? Is people hungry on other days besides Thanksgivin? Does they need shoes on other days besides Christmas? God treasures the things we do, not because it's a special day or a special time. All things is special when you doin it for God.

But when you reachin out to folks, 'specially if you just reachin out when other folks expects it, you got to ask yourself—is you doin it for God, or is you doin it for you? The things you do for nothin is the things you keep forever. 'Cause when you servin down here 'cause you 'xpect somethin—maybe like your friends is lookin at you like you is some kinda saint, or it's the holidays, and you feel guilty 'cause you ain't done nothin for nobody all year—then you ain't doin it for “nothin.” You doin it for somethin. If you doin it for somethin, you already done got paid. God don't pay no overtime.

Don't give yourself credit for what you do. Don't let your right hand know what your left is doin. If you lookin for pride and prestige and glory, you lookin for trouble. We got to put our pride aside and take care a' God's business.

I ain't got no way to read the mind a' God, but I 'xpect part a' His business is makin it Christmas for somebody ever day. If all the Christians—I mean
all
of 'em—got outta the pews on Sundays and into the streets, we'd shut the city down.

We'd shut down hunger.

We'd shut down loneliness.

We'd shut down the notion that there is any such of a thing as a person that don't deserve a kind word and a second chance.

9

Ron

“I'm gon' kill whoever done it!” he screamed. “I'm gon' kill whoever stole my shoes!” Then he sprayed the air with a volley of curses and advanced into the crowd, roundhousing his fists at anyone stupid enough to get in his way . . .

“I think you should try to make friends with him.”

“Me!” My eyes widened in disbelief. “Did you not notice that the man you want me to make friends with just threatened to kill twenty people?”

[Deborah] laid her hand on my shoulder and tilted her head with a smile. “I really think God's laid it on my heart that you need to reach out to him.”

“Sorry,” I said, trying hard to ignore the head tilt, “but I wasn't at that meeting where you heard from God.”

A
fter Denver and I struck up our unlikely friendship at the mission, we had a bargain. I was going to show him how to get along with the country-club set, and he was going to show me how to get along in the 'hood. When Deborah first dragged me down to serve at the mission, my biggest worry was catching a disease or some kind of creepy-crawly infestation. But after a while, my heart toward the homeless softened up to the point where I actually started going out into the streets with Denver to reach out to the homeless.

And yet for all of my brand-new do-gooding, I was still a judgmental varmint. I wish I could say that “deep down” I was a judgmental varmint. But no, it was pretty much right there on the surface.

I remember one day in particular when Denver and I went out on the streets surrounding the mission. I had maybe a couple of hundred bucks in cash, and I'd visit with people, ask how they were doing, and bless them with a few dollars.

It's important to draw a distinction between “blessing” the homeless and “helping” the homeless. I used to think I was helping by serving a meal or giving them some clothes, but I found out that for the most part I was just helping myself, making myself feel warm and fuzzy and philanthropic.

To be sure, it is a
blessing
to the homeless when they see people who care. But to really help, you've got to get down in the pit with people and stay with them until they find the strength to get on your shoulders and climb out. Helping someone is when you find out how to help them move toward wholeness and then hang with them until they make a change.

So when Denver and I walked the streets of Fort Worth, it was with the specific intent of bringing blessing. Of stopping to talk to people who are used to folks crossing streets to
avoid
talking to them. Of being a bright smile, a touch of humanity.

It was a crisp, autumn afternoon, and we were heading back toward the mission. I had already made like Santa Claus and passed out almost all the money I had. All I had left was a twenty-dollar bill. Well, we turned a corner and came upon a Hispanic man who looked drunk enough to fry ice cream with his breath. Probably in his fifties, he looked seventy, with gnarled hands and brown skin wrinkled like a crushed grocery sack. Wearing smudged jeans and a threadbare flannel shirt of red lumberjack plaid, he lounged so hard against the brick wall of a streetside warehouse that I couldn't tell whether he was trying to hold himself up or keep the wall from falling down.