FNO

This past Friday, Kwang and I went to NewCom's monthly Friday Night Outreach. It's an event where people come together, put together care packages (warm clothes, food, and directions to the church's warming center), and go find homeless people on Friday night and distribute it to them.

We met Scott on the ramp coming off Armitage where he held a sign -- "Laid off." I didn't catch the other words. When the light turned green and he came to the side, we went to talk to him and handed him the care package.

Scott was a white man, probably around 27 years old, with dirty blonde hair that hadn't been cut or washed in months. He told us the story that he got laid off from his company and couldn't afford his rent anymore, so he left his apartment because he didn't want to wait for the police to evict him. He'd been homeless since the fall and made it through the winter. He thanked us for the food -- "Thank you so much man...I couldn't have made it out without people like you guys" -- other churches had also given him care packages before.

What hit me about his story was that it was quite unremarkable. He didn't have wealthy parents to lean on, and it sounded like he had been educated in his skill, just the company wasn't doing well. Just like that -- he got laid off and couldn't pay the Chicago rent. I can only imagine if someone gets laid of in SF or NYC, how quickly they couldn't afford their $3K/month apartments.

Had I grown up in a different environment, that could be me out there.

One thing I'm grateful for what my peers, Northwestern, and Chicago has done to me is poke holes in the gospel I knew. The one that tells me that my sins are forgiven and to go and be holy. This gospel sounds good on the service until we start seeing how much Jesus actually talked about the poor and dejected.

I don't claim to know much about this topic honestly, but it's just a reminder to me that life's purpose is more than comfort. I say that as I'm about to fly to California for spring break to have fun. I don't know. I don't want to wake up one day and realize that all I've done in the past 50 years is try build the most comfortable life for myself. Besides, I do think with that thinking, a "successful" person will get all the material comfort money provides and realize they're not comfortable at all.