Those in Need

For the Lord your God is the God of gods and Lord of lords. He is the great God, the mighty and awesome God, who shows no partiality and cannot be bribed. He ensures that orphans and widows receive justice. He shows love to the foreigners (those in need) living among you and gives them food and clothing. So you, too, must show love to foreigners (those in need), for you yourselves were once foreigners (in need) in the land of Egypt. Deuteronomy 10:17-19 (parentheses added)

Plastered across the top of Kitchen One for One’s website in big, bold lettering it says, “We’re a non-profit food truck serving fresh-quality meals to those in need.” We can imagine that God reads this and thinks it’s great. It’s a good cause. As Christians involved with Kitchen One for One we probably see it as noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and worthy of praise. And, it is. We are doing a good thing. We are doing exactly what God told His people to do when instructing them on how to be a nation.

But it’s not about us.

It’s about them. It’s about those in need.

This week we will be serving at a hotel turned homeless shelter in Denver that houses more than 200 families who are experiencing homelessness. Talk about being in need. Talk about feeling like a foreigner.

Homelessness is a complex issue that most of us can only see the bitter results of. We see those experiencing homelessness, but rarely do we contemplate the circumstances that got them there. There’s no singular explanation for how people fall into homelessness and reach such depths of being in need. At our events this week, we will serve people who are made in the image of God who suffer from mental health issues, who are doing everything within reach to recover from drug and alcohol abuse, who’ve had nowhere else to go while running from abuse, whose own families have neglected their responsibilities to care for them, who aged out of foster care, and the reasons go on and on.

Each person we serve has a story holding different tragic turns that have contributed to their unique situation. We fail to honor the complexities of suffering when we oversimplify these contributing factors, or worse, assign blame to the image-bearer on the street because we look down on them because we don’t want to be like them.

Dignity is not given by having a place to call home. Dignity is given by Christ, at creation. Therefore, we have a duty to speak about and toward those experiencing homelessness in ways that recognize the God-given value of dignity. We aren’t giving people dignity. We are simply affirming it.

It’s important for us to understand this as we seek to love and serve those in need… we are all saved by the same grace, and it is only by grace that we are where we are.

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. Ephesians 2:8-9