Helping those who hurt

In a recent ser­mon at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, I men­tioned I was help­ing a home­less woman new to town who pushed the bound­aries of my com­fort zone. Before arriv­ing at Emmanuel’s door, she had been at the hos­pi­tal after leav­ing the Beacon of Hope Shelter. Before that, she had a brief stint at Eastern State Hospital in Lexington and SUN Hospital in Erlanger, after time at mis­sions and shel­ters in Louisville and south­ern Indiana. According to her sto­ries, she’s been on Disability and Medicaid since 1995, grew up in Tennessee and Indiana, and is the last of her liv­ing fam­i­ly members.

Helping folks and being present with God’s peo­ple is par for the course for all of God’s chil­dren, not just ordained cler­gy, but our steepled build­ing and my col­lar can serve as bea­cons for those who feel lost, afraid, and alone. This was the first time I walked along­side some­one while they were admit­ted to the sys­tem at Clark County Community Services and held their vouchered cloth­ing items at CC’s Closet. This was the first time I sat with some­one while at an appoint­ment at Clark County Homeless Coalition.

Part of our time also includ­ed dri­ving to the Beacon to retrieve her belong­ings, to Wal-Mart to cash gov­ern­ment checks, to Best Western to get a roof over her head for a few days, and to Dollar General, Goodwill, and back to an apart­ment where some­one invit­ed her to stay for a bit.

Glimpsing at her pre­scrip­tion med­ica­tions I could tell she need­ed some­place that is staffed to look after her deci­sion-mak­ing, or at least be around if she had ques­tions about things.

She could recall what street her church was on when she was six years old but couldn’t remem­ber that she put her address book in her purse three min­utes ago. She could tell sto­ries of life in Dickson and Donaldson Tennessee, name her neigh­bors and church friends from 50 years pri­or, and dream of a small-town house with a yard where she could walk and win­dow-shop dur­ing Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Yet, she thought the man cross­ing the street in front of us was the devil.

Mary Ann is the same age as my old­est broth­er would be — 65. Once alco­holism had tak­en hold of his spir­it and his every­day life, he spi­raled into drugs and psy­chosis. He called me one day to help get my mom out of his locked truck — she’d been dead for a few years. He was briefly home­less until the VA helped him get a lit­tle apart­ment in Louisville. I would stop by and check his hid­ing places for drugs and alco­hol while he wasn’t look­ing, and he would share home videos from the ear­ly- to mid-70s, a time when he was at the height of his con­fi­dence and self-respect.

When I last vis­it­ed him in the hos­pi­tal before he died, he was an emp­ty shell of the hero I knew when I was younger, and the man I knew when I became a father. If you met Tom for the first time in that hos­pi­tal bed, you’d swear he was 80 years old. He was 55, the same age I am now.

Our coun­try, our com­mu­ni­ties, our church­es, and our fam­i­lies have a hard time fac­ing men­tal health issues and the peo­ple who live with them. While it’s easy to point at Scripture when read­ing about peo­ple with demons and claim “Oh, that’s men­tal ill­ness, but they didn’t know that 2,000 years ago,” we still treat folks with that same stig­ma of being soci­etal out­casts, rather than beloved chil­dren of God. So many of us are bro­ken and hurt­ing, through trau­ma, or chem­i­cal imbal­ances, or loss, and don’t know what to do when look­ing at men­tal ill­ness head-on.

In my time with Mary Ann, I helped bring her to folks who are trained in this field, who know the right ques­tions to ask, and who have far more patience than me to help find the right and prop­er path for her at this time. What they can’t do, and what I can’t do is make sure she does the work on her part to help her­self get to a bet­ter place. That’s where prayer comes in. That’s where faith comes in. That’s where God comes in. Yes, we rely on God in times of cri­sis and pain, and in times of joy, but we also have to do our share of the work in this world — that’s how prayer works. That’s how faith works. That’s how God works.