on the streets in Cincinnati

I was up before light this morning and asking in the lobby where I might find a coffeeshop in the neighborhood of our hotel. Hotel staff gave me directions to a nearby Starbucks, and I proceeded to walk outside to accidentally take a right, left instead of a left, right as she had told me to do. I could tell quickly that I was heading in the dark toward even darker streets, and I was keenly aware that I was a woman, a stranger to this city, and I had with me my laptop and my bookbag that had every dollar and bank card I had brought on the trip. At one corner, I met a homeless man seated up against a building with a big backpack and bedroll next to him. I asked him the location of the Starbucks that I was trying to find, and he pointed me in the right direction, ending with a "can you spare me change for a cup of coffee?"

With my response being that I'd buy him a cup if he wanted to come along, I found myself walking and talking with Gary, a man who'd been on the streets for four years. In our course of conversation over a cup of coffee and some donuts at Starbucks, Gary became a man with a story rather than an object and statistic of homelessness that we typically picture in our minds. Gary graduated from high school one year behind me and has a birthday in two days. He's troubled by the death of his mom 17 years ago, a death that he believes was a murder at the hands of his half brothers, but that the police ruled a suicide. Gary is obsessed with this and trying to prove the police are dirty. No matter how many topics we addressed, Gary came back to this story.

On our walk back toward the hotel, the city had begun to bustle at 6:30 in the morning. The street we took back was not the street that we had taken to get coffee, and I was amazed by the mix of the business community and street folks. That always impacts me so much in the downtowns of large cities. The stark extremes of wealth and poverty sharing the same sidewalk but not sharing eye contact. It's just such a picture of our separateness and brokenness as a society.

Gary and I parted after I told him that I'd like to pray Jesus's peace for him over his mom's death, and now I'm sitting in the hotel lobby ready to do a little reading and noticing several of the ccda leadership wandering through. My daughter just called to usher in the morning and I'm now going to attempt to "chat" with her a spell on facebook. Our group is excited to be here...it's fun to watch the relationships begin, and we're anticipating all that God has for us through this week.