The book all incoming freshman need to read this next semester is called Under The Overpass: A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America by Mike Yankoski.
Mike his friend Sam travel to and live homeless in 6 cities over a 5 month period. The book recaps much of Sam and Mike's journey and the way they were able to reflect upon their faith through their experiences on the streets and their interactions with numerous "church-goers" throughout those 5 months.
It was a really good book. A lot of story telling and some really honest and valuable reflection from their perspective after going through that experience. As usual, I have quotes to share.
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"For the life of me, I couldn’t find a connecting thread of radical, living obedience between what I said about my world and how I lived it."
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"I sat there in church struggling to remember a time when I’d actually needed to lean fully on Christ rather than my own abilities. Not much came to mind."
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"Lying there, in the same room as 150 drug addicts, felons, alcoholics, and homeless men, with Taylor snoring not three feet away, I suddenly felt entirely weak, unable, and inadequate to bridge the gap between myself and these men. Then I realized I didn’t have to bridge that chasm. That wasn’t my responsibility. My responsibility was simply to be there, and to trust that the Lord would use me, that he would bridge the distance."
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"The men I was meeting were at the bottom—the worst point of their lives—and weren’t afraid to admit it. But the ruin opened the way for honesty. Pretending didn’t help anymore, and anyway, they didn’t have the strength to keep it up. They just told it as it was, when it was. I found that part of living in ruin refreshing."
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"Something critical is missing in places that care for the broken and needy if the only people there are also broken and needy. Without the presence of people in the rescue missions whose lives are not defined by addiction, alcoholism, crime, and mental illness, there is little positive influence. Chaplains and pastors can only spread themselves so far."
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"If we are the body of Christ—and Christ came not for the healthy but the sick—we need to be fully present in the places where people are most broken. And it has to be more than just a financial presence. That helps, of course. But too often money is insulation—it conveniently keeps us from ever having to come face-to-face with a man or woman who life is in tatters."
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"Our good intentions and sound theology are wasted when the people we minister to don’t feel that we care about their immediate concerns."
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"All of God’s children are beggars at the foot of the Cross, broken people in need of mending."
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"A church is just a building if there’s no one in it."
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"Begging is hard. It’s something you expect hungry dogs to do, but not men and women made in God’s image. The minute you put out your hand, or open your guitar case, it feels like you’re writing 'failure' and 'weakness' all over yourself. You’re telling everyone who comes by, 'I am unable.' The message blares up and down the sidewalk, and across multiple lanes of traffic. And the message doesn’t stop screaming until you pull back your hand, or close up your case."
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"In his book The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning writes, 'We are all equally privileged but unentitled beggars at the door of God’s mercy.' I thought of that as person after person walked past without donating or even making eye contact. I felt frustration rising until I realized how unentitled I really was. No one deserves mercy. And no one walking by owed us a dime. Mercy is, by definition, undeserved, or else it isn’t mercy. Every coin in the case looked different after that."
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“I want to eat” no longer meant just walking to the refrigerator or ordering off the menu. Every sandwich demanded hours of sitting on hot cement, playing and singing, trying to be heard above the noise of the street. And on this afternoon, exhaustion from walking everywhere, the dehydration of living outside, and the lack of sleep from being constantly moved by the police and security guards had taken its toll. So we just sat, half-aware, watching people ignore us."
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"When you kneel, hungry and broken at His table, you receive grace from Him you might, at some other time, have completely missed."
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"I remember many times I had walked past a homeless man or woman sitting on the sidewalk, awkwardly averting my eyes and whistling to cover my discomfort. I wondered if those men and women had been frustrated with me as I now was with the people who were walking down the stairs."
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"We agreed that our own ideas and expectations tended to make us deaf to hearing God’s will. We needed, at least at times, to lay down and listen. Leave the next move completely up to God."
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"What is your definition of a Christian? Is it broad enough to encompass the drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and broken people of the world? Jesus said that he came to heal the sick. Drug dealers are messed up just the same as liars are messed up, just the same as all humans are messed up. We all need Jesus. We all struggle with personal ways in which sin plays itself out their eyes."
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"What’s worse? To not do dope or to not love your brother? Why do we kick drug users out of the church while quietly ignoring those who aren’t dealing with other, equally destructive sins? Why do we reject the loving, self-sacrificing, giving, encouraging, Jesus-pursing drug addict but recruit the clean, self-interested, gossiping, loveless churchgoer? Which one do you supposed Jesus would rather share a burrito with under a bridge?"
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"If we as believers choose to forget that everyone—even the shrunken soul lying in the doorway—is made in the image of God, can we say we know our Creator? If we respond to others based on their outward appearance, haven’t we entirely missed the point of the gospel?"
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"To me, one of the best things about the gospel is that Jesus Christ proclaims and restores human and eternal worth for everyone who believes—regardless of what a person might look like or smell like now, no matter what’s crawling through his hair. And because we follow this Christ, each of us has both the ability and responsibility ('response-ability') to do the same."
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"The words 'Jesus loves you' take on a whole different meaning when you’re down and out. You hear them differently. You need them more. Just saying them to the next desperate person you meet could change his day. Wrap those words in friendship, a home-cooked meal, bus fare, and you could change his life."
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"Walking into a church where we hoped to find genuine fellowship only to be met by condescension or suspicion or disingenuous flattery was the worst kind of rejection."
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"We don’t go to church, we are the church. So many problems that show up on the church steps, or in the pews, or between congregations seem to start with misunderstandings about that. The church isn’t a physical building or doctrinal statement or perfectly produced program. It is us—we are the living expression of Christ’s presence in this world, His body. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we’ll be able to be the healing body of Christ to our sin-sick world."
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"The bottom line is real love shows itself in action."
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It's a solid book. I'm going to be discussing it with people for a while once school starts. Hopefully the conversations are fruitful. I'm sure they will be.
Peace.
