I have a story I’d like to share from the other night while out on the streets of Belfast. We were volunteering for a ministry called “Beautiful Feet” and it is a homeless ministry in the city centre. We showed up around 7:30pm and had a very funny chat with a character of a man sporting a giant sombrero, scraggly long beard, and brandishing protest signs all over his person and bicycle. Never quite figured out what he was really protesting or maybe more to the point – what he was not protesting against. Anyways, we met at a café in town and met some other people we would be hitting the streets with.
It was all just some friendly chatting and a prayer before we rocked out in small groups to find homeless people out on the streets. We were armed with sandwiches and juice and some other small items that we might be able to offer people. Truthfully I didn’t know what to expect and didn’t really expect that we would be able to offer much more than some sustenance and maybe a word of encouragement to get them through another day on the street.
The first few encounters we had were a bit rough and one guy was in pretty bad shape with dried blood all around the edge of his mouth and was so smashed drunk the bus stop wall was the only thing holding him on his feet. The cops stopped and said they already tried to help him the night before and that same day but he wouldn’t take help or an ambulance. The cops stayed with him and we had to move on so we carried on down the street to a park. In my group was Brittany Cox (from L.Chaim) and a father and daughter from Bangor (a city just northeast of Belfast) who had only one week prior experience with this organization. We arrived at the park and saw a group of three people sitting on a park bench. We introduced ourselves and began assessing the situation. The man sitting on the ground was finishing up a two liter bottle of hard cider and was slightly out of his mind. The other two however were sitting orderly on the park bench and we began talking with them. The woman was very regretful of her situation and explained the physical abuse she suffered from her husband and that he kicked her out of the house and she fled to Belfast. It turned out she was from Bangor as well and they began to question her on where she lived. It turned out the woman lived just a few streets down from their house and the girl knew this woman’s daughter from school. In that moment the situation began very personal for the father and daughter with us and an indescribable connection started to occur. She prayed with the woman and both of them wept the whole time.
The woman agreed to go back to Bangor as her husband had left the house already and she was just trying to get back there. We gave her bus fare back and they asked that she come to their church to begin getting her back on her feet. She agreed to do so and she gave all of us a hug and thanked us for what we were doing. We walked away from that time all a little shocked by the experience. We were all new at this and really didn’t know what to expect – much less we couldn’t have expected our encounters to have such an personal connection. It was confirmation for me and I hope much more so for this father/daughter team that this work is very important and not just for trying to brighten a day or feed someone a sandwich, but that this can actually change lives. That these are people who need help and who need to know not everyone has forgotten them.
