Lunch with the homeless

Although our focus on this summer project is campus ministry, we do desire to be a blessing to the community as a whole and not just its students. As a result, our team will be doing some sort of community service every other Saturday. This past Saturday, we had our first service project where we joined one of the UH Crusade students (Matt) in an outreach he and his friends started last year of sharing lunch with the homeless (instead of just handing them food and leaving) at Ala Moana Beach Park. We divided the team (30 students/14 staff+2 staff kids) into groups of 3-4 and sent them out with bowls of chili and rice (a local favorite) and bottles of water to share with the homeless.

To be honest, it was a bit outside of my own comfort zone, but Matt reminded us the homeless are people too, and that they have a story and are hungry not just for food but for company and people to talk to. I ended up being in a group with 2 students (S and K), and we met a man named Jeff who was immediately suspicious of our motives when we came with food, asking if we were from a church group and if we were going to push Jesus on him. We told him that we were from a Christian organization but that we just wanted to have lunch with him.

He let us sit down with him and then proceeded to share about his own beliefs for the next 1.5 hours, during which we mostly smiled and nodded and tried to squeeze in questons about himself and his own story of how he ended up at the park, and how his beliefs affected his daily life. Those attempts didn't really work too well; he just kept going about why John Lennon was the source of all evil and the popularity of Christianity in the tates, something about a chair held in the sky by electromagnetic forces and a mish mash of history with scientific terms that were redefined in nonsensical ways. For example, he said homology was the mechanism behind telekenesis (he actually meant ESP). Other comments he made were either so racist or so outrageous that I really had no idea how to respond.

I know my group had a hard time with conversation, but it sounds like other groups got into some good conversations. One student discovered that she actually had a lot in common with the homeless person their group met, so she shared her story with him. Another group ended up getting into spiritual conversation and eventually an opportunity to share the gospel, which the man said he'd never heard explained that way before. It's encouraging to know that even if i personally didn't have a super positive experience, God was still at work on the park that day.