Shawty

Today I attended my second memorial service of 2012...which sucks. But this one was at beautiful feet in respect of a homeless man, Billy who would eat with us regularly.  Billy was almost half my size and as he would come up to get his tray the community service ladies would always get excited and shriek "Hey Shawty" and I remember worrying that it would offend him.  Well it turns out that, that was his name.

Shawty passed in the night a couple of weeks ago as he froze to death.  This messes with me to be in such an affluent country of excess, how is it even possible for a man down the road to get so cold that his body stops? Shawty was 38 and died unaware that his daughter is carrying his grandchild as she was yet to track him down.

I didn't know what to expect from a Beautiful Feet Memorial Service, even just what to wear... but I kind of hoped to be able to tell about how beautiful it was with the homeless coming together as a family.  And I guess it was beautiful... the picked flowers one woman lay by his ashes, the homeless man that recited poems he had written and the fond stories shared.  But it was also horrible, the man who knelt before the table with his ashes on but messed up the cloth on it as he drunkenly struggled to stand back up and the many homeless knelt before the alter knowing that without change, their lives are headed in the same direction.  Holly talked afterwards of the brokenness of it all and how it is right that we come before the Lord broken, but it seems like these people are leaving broken too.  Christ brings wholeness and new life and I pray his renewal over the lives of these people.

In a way I too am homeless in America, puzzling over the hospitality, love and comfort I have constantly received in sobering contrast to the life of my neighbor who died on the streets because he had nowhere to stay.