There were two of us in the car; I had been accompanied to the Windy City by a thoughtful friend, and we had decided to head over to Michigan Avenue, the famous Magnificent Mile—composed of impressive shopping centers which rise towering into the air above you on all sides. It’s tempting—especially as a tall person who sometimes feels a bit like a tower herself—to look up…to let the lines of the architecture draw one’s vision to the top, to stand in the middle of the sidewalk tottering dangerously from side to side while gawking up into the air and looking frightfully much like a tourist who is about to collide with a light pole.
Everything about Michigan Avenue appears to be full of life: the shoppers bustle in and out with enthusiastic smiles, talking animatedly. The traffic moves along in one congested, tangled mass of chaotic motion, horns beeping, cars swerving, taxi drivers gesticulating angrily. The buildings themselves are lit, elaborate, ornate, silent—colossal monuments to the creative ingenuity of the human mind.
It was all new, exciting, fresh, and fascinating—a feast for the senses, and it was difficult to know where to look first.
We were driving, paused at a red light, conversing excitedly with each other about various aspects of all the marvels that surrounded us…and then I saw her.
She was alone, sitting beneath a gigantic statue erected to honor the memory of someone who has now been forgotten. Her dirty blanket was wrapped around her tightly, and a worn duffel bag sat beside her on the pavement. Her eyes were closed against the cold, and even from across the street, I could see that the muscles of her face were tense, drawn against the semi-arctic cold of a bitter Midwestern winter.
What was most startling to me was not the fact that she was homeless, alone, destitute on the streets of Chicago on an afternoon cold enough to give frostbite to a polar bear. What assaulted the senses and saddened the mind was the fact that people were walking right past her without even noticing that she was there. Not so much as a passing glance as they walked by three inches from where she sat with her little sign. No smile, no look of pity or compassion, no kind word, no offer of assistance.
“Look over there,” I said, almost desperately, “look at her. She’s homeless.”
My friend’s eyes followed my pointing finger, but the comment was met with a shrug. “Yeah. Homeless people. They’re everywhere in Chicago.”
As the light turned green, the car moved away in the endless swarm of insistent city traffic, but the picture stayed in my mind…and all through the long hours of the night, as we drove, I wondered what Christians are truly called to do, say, and think in the face of the abject poverty and obvious physical need on our own doorstep.
Maybe it’s not possible to give a car, a house, and a job to every homeless person we meet…but surely we have a responsibility to do something?
There’s a passage from James 2, where the apostle asks, “what good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead…”
What does that practically look like? What does it mean for me, as a Christian, in how I relate to the homeless? I’m honestly not sure at this moment. But I know that somehow, on many levels, it does relate. And while I’m not entirely positive what Christ would have done with a homeless old woman in downtown Chicago, I can’t help but think that He wouldn’t have just passed by without noticing her. Because on a deep, significant, and life-changing level, He would have cared. About her situation. About her. And because He would have, we must—because Christianity is not a passive, comfortable faith, but a pro-active, life-giving, heart-changing, effort-requiring, transformational reality that should cause us to think, speak, and respond differently than we would have before…
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