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By Root 513 0

the baptisms and altruism of the church jump-start them in the right direction? As much as I would love to report, “Yes! They were saved by these saints sent from heaven!” most of the guys were back to their normal selves before we even left the parking lot of the church. They walked a block back over to their perch at Marion Square, cup in hand, asking for a dollar to get something to eat. Or drink. Or smoke. Just as I had seen many times in my life before, one simple act of kindness could never hold up against the lure of the vices of such a freelance lifestyle. They needed repetition to get off the streets. While some were self-motivated and had merely stumbled through a tough time in their lives, most of them needed someone constantly in their ear telling them:

Hey, buddy! You in there? Cuz, uh, I don’t know how exactly to tell you this, but, uh, you’re screwin’ up. Big time. But I tell ya what…All is not lost! There’s plenty of opportunity for you. Help is on the way, my friend. But check this out: I’m gonna need a little extra effort coming from your end.

And that’s where Crisis Ministries came in. That’s why the system at Crisis Ministries had proven, and would continue to prove, to be so effective. In the world of homelessness, perhaps one act of kindness or one attempt to adjust someone’s attitude could be dismissed or even forgotten, but that’s not what Crisis Ministries was offering. They were offering help, day in and day out. There was no escaping it. Everybody—from the director of the center to the front desk staff to the families from the churches that served us food in the kitchen—was there to help us get out.

At the heart of all the work at Crisis Ministries were the case managers. Every week they evaluated our progress, letting us know what we were doing right and wrong. They pointed us in the right direction for the services we needed—medical care, employment, counseling, child care, and more. We set goals and followed up on those goals. Every week. It wasn’t a situation where we met with them once and they moved on to the next guy. They were there for us until we were out. Even before my Wednesday meeting with Kazia, I had already heard so much about the value of the case management services. Easy E, a self-made man in his own right, had even told me that without his case manager, he might have fallen through the cracks already. And with his drug addiction, who knew where he might have ended up.

Surely, throughout the course of the baptism, any churchgoer that walked past me would have noticed the stench radiating from my body after such a dirty day of work with George. They probably would have loved for me to assume the position on stage to get baptized just so I could rinse off in the pool, but artificial acts like those had always come back to haunt me in some form or fashion later on, so I decided against it.

By Sunday night—just my sixth night in the shelter—I had become part of the “in” group. I was checking in to the shelter a half hour early because of my participation on the morning clean-up crew, so I was able to pick out any spot to put my mattress. And nobody was giving me a hard time. I couldn’t tell exactly how I had come to be accepted (or perhaps merely tolerated) within just a week of my time at the shelter, but I suppose it had a lot to do with the fact that I had come in and, essentially, kept my mouth shut. I let them come to me. If I had come in and acted like I was somebody special—somebody superior to the life at the shelter, just as many before me had done and many after me would do—then my story might have turned in a different direction. People would be shunned and picked on if they came in and acted like they were above the shelter, like they didn’t belong there. I had reached my decision to remain in the shadows mostly out of fear of the unknown arena in which I found myself, but by Sunday evening, I had realized that this indigent world was, if you were able to blend in, harmless. By Sunday evening, I had already developed an in-depth system for how to get by in the