Seattle (Spring Break 2011)

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Seattle with 15 other ACU students on a Spring Break Campaign. I had heard good things about this trip from students who traveled to Seattle in prior years, but I was very pleasantly surprised with how deeply I came to know (or at least feel like I know), care about, and desire to return to Seattle over the course of the week. Our primary work was with various homeless shelters around the city.

The situation in Seattle for unhoused people is very unique. Seattle is very liberal and very unchurched, and they are extremely generous towards the unhoused. On many occasions, I spoke to people who said something to the effect of, “I came from [insert faraway city], but when I needed a fresh start, I knew to come to Seattle.” In other words, Seattle has gained a reputation for being a good place to be unhoused (if you have to be unhoused). There are multiple places in which you can get hot meals three times a day with no questions asked—including one effort, “Operation Sack Lunch,” that cooks and serves 100% organic food (!) for hundreds of people daily. There are free beds available at night, free showers available in the morning, and free buses in the afternoon to take you where you need to go.

It is easy to get cynical in such a city when you begin to think about how the system could be abused, especially when you speak with individuals who are entirely content to live off of the charity of others for the rest of their lives. But that cynicism kind of evaporates when you talk to someone…and another person…and another person, all of whom aren't real great at conversation, and you start to recognize the staggering percentage of Seattle’s unhoused population that is (in many cases, severely) mentally disabled. And then you start to marvel at the infrastructure of a city in which people who need help can eat day-old Starbucks pastries for free with their lunches. I left with many questions about how the rich ought to use their wealth in relation to the poor, but I could not deny that the people who work tirelessly every day in order to make sure David and Ricky eat were doing something good, the kind of thing my heart tells me Jesus would be about.

Late one evening, we went out on a “Search and Rescue” caper sponsored by one of the local shelters, Union Gospel Mission. A handful of us loaded up in a van, fairly uncertain about what was about to go down but full of adrenaline from a combination of the mystery, the cold, and the dark. Our driver was an older man who had told me he had started working recently with a shelter for battered women and children, and because he was an avid backpacker, he had been taking the children on backpacking trips. This required him to get licensed to drive a 15-passenger van, and once he had that license, other shelters started recruiting him to drive (like for “Search and Rescue”). His co-pilot and navigator was a guy I had gotten to know a few days before, a permanent resident of UGM who was recovering from drug addiction.

With the back of the van loaded full of blankets, socks, jackets, socks, underwear, sandwiches, and even a vat of steaming white hot chocolate, we pulled out into the night to seek out (“Search”) and offer aid and prayers (“Rescue”) to various people around the town who, for whatever reason, hadn’t made it into a shelter that night and were sleeping outside. Our co-pilot knew the hotspots, and usually we’d drive up to find one or two people but end up passing out goods to 8-12 people who wandered over. The hot chocolate especially was a roaring success.

The entire ride that night was an adventure, but one experience was particularly moving for me. At one of our earliest stops, a man named Pops accepted some hot chocolate. We had a long conversation, and I learned that he was a photographer who loved photos of nature; he explained that he had even camped near one lake for a week trying every morning to get a perfect sunrise shot. About 10 minutes into our conversation, I lost my breath for a moment because I noticed how incredibly similar Pops looked to my own grandpa. The resemblance wasn’t perfect—he was missing a few teeth, and he was a bit wider around the middle—but his eyes were a close enough match to distract me for the rest of the conversation.

It was one of those unexplainable moments in which I felt a deep, intense connection to this stranger I literally met underneath a highway. Any lingering biases or prejudices against unhoused people vanished as I asked more questions, suddenly filled with curiosity about who Pops was, where he’d been, what he’d experienced, who his family was. We didn’t have much longer to talk before I had to load back into the van to head to our next destination, and he turned down my offer to pray for him. As we pulled away, I couldn’t stop thinking about how Pops had suddenly become a human to me. It was deeply troubling, as I realized with shame that I was still stuck in the mentality of seeing unhoused people—or, if I’m honest, any people outside of my particular way of life—as projects, as demographics, as opportunities. No, Pops was a human, and his resemblance to a man I know well helped me see that.

I could talk much longer about our experiences from the week, but highlights include a Sunday night Compline service at an Episcopal cathedral that nourished my spirit, an evening devo overlooking the Seattle skyline in which we were challenged to question whether God’s mission really needed every ACU graduate to move to DFW or stay in Abilene, the kindness of numerous strangers who showed us where to find food and everything else during our Urban Plunge, and a dinner at the Northwest Church—the church, I haven’t even talked about the church!—in which every table included a church member with an incredible tale of God’s redemptive work in his or her life.

I am extremely grateful that I had the opportunity to visit Seattle, a place whose climate is as different from Abilene’s as its politics, culture, and religious demographics are, for the week. As my good friend and co-campaigner put it, it was great to see “a place where the kingdom of God is breaking in in a big way—the people just don’t have the vocabulary to describe it.”