I am currently staying at a warming station located inside a church. However, I’m not very welcome here because instead of attending church services all day, I come to Hardee’s to access the internet and make posts like this one. They can’t understand that me writing this post, or being able to get online to play a game with someone that feels alone, is just as much an act as Christian fellowship as attending Sunday School or church services. People around here really like to judge others based on very few facts. They see something that isn’t like everything else and immediately start to fear and turn against it.
As many of you know, I have a great many skills in the areas of computers, networking, and web development, but when I offer those services to the church that is sheltering me, they refuse it because I can’t be trusted. I’m one of them. The homeless.
The pastor of the church is a good man I think, but there are far too many in his ministry that he’s given power to that are too suspicious, too gossiping, and too prideful to do any real good. I’ve spoken with him about this, and it seems that rather than listen to me, he will take the side of the “good Christians” of his congregation. Why should he listen to me? Who am I to advise him? What good could come from this Naazreen???
Although there is Wi-Fi available at the church, I can no longer access it because someone downloaded a copyrighted file, which resulted in me losing my internet access completely. This means that staying at the warming station is hindering my efforts to make posts on this website, the manner that I’ve chosen to not only get myself out of this situation but to help others in the same spot.
What’s really offensive is the fact that since I am the only homeless person with a laptop, I’m obviously the one that downloaded the illegal file. The first day the warming station was moved to this location and placed under the care of the pastor of this church, I told the pastor about the sort of skills I had and how they might benefit the ministry. I made the offer to look at his network and secure it so that no one could do anything bad on it and he didn’t take me up on the offer. Now, because I know these things, because I have these very sought after skills, because I’m a giving person that tries to be upfront with people from the start, I’m not whispered about and pointed at as the one that did something wrong.
I told him about this website and my intentions, I told him that I’m homeless right now more because I wanted to help the homeless from a position they could trust: as one of them. I don’t know if he ever really believed me, but there are others that I told why I’m doing this and I think they will give their testimony in front of witnesses, on camera and before judges that I’m doing this not for MY sake, but so that I might be able to better help others.
They are complaining about the way I’m choosing to try to get myself out of this situation because it is not the normal, traditional manner of work. I’ve put in applications at just about every retail and food service place within walking distance and had no response even after calling and asking them to review my application. Why is this happening? Because here, people don’t respect facts as much as they respect gossip.
The McDonald’s Incident
Several months ago, I used to spend the hours that the library wasn’t open at the local McDonald’s. Most of the evening staff knew me and I was pleasant and friendly and when I had some money, I would buy something so I wasn’t just sucking up Wi-Fi and electricity without giving something back when I could. I put in an application online at that location at the urging of several of the people I spoke with while using the Wi-Fi. The day before my scheduled interview, without approaching me and speaking with me directly first, one of the morning managers called the police and said that they had me on camera masturbating in the lobby. I have a medical condition called phimosis. Look it up. Because of this there were times when I would be sitting in a seat for a good length of time and before I could stand up, I would have to adjust my underwear so that it would not stick to very tender and inflamed flesh and make a bad situation worse. That’s what they caught on camera and when I tried to explain this to the police officer that was called, his response was “Well that’s just your story.” What was I supposed to do to defended myself in this situation? Drop my pants in the parking lot to prove my story? Keep talking back to the belligerent police officer until he decided that I was making to much of a problem and get myself put in jail on whatever trumped up charges they could come up with and sit there till a magistrate or judge threw it out for lack of evidence? How far do I have to go just to be treated with the same respect that everyone else feels entitled to?
In the end, there was no paperwork that I saw written, but the officer did take my picture and told me that he would spread it around the county so that everyone knew what kind of degenerate I was. As I said, there’s no paperwork that I know of. Nothing official. Just some rumors that have been spread around and keeps me from getting any sort of basic job. But they are all “good Christians.”
Grace
I was taught that when you become so obsessed with correcting everyone else’s sins that you start ignoring your own, you have forgotten the lessons that come with the gift of Grace. You have forgotten that the ONLY reason you are where you are, that you have a home, a car, a steady paycheck, a family, is because our God stepped down from on high to come and live among us as our Lord and Saviour. Why am I in this position if I really have all these skills and abilities?
Because I’m not willing to sign contracts to enslave myself to a corporate entity that will then force me to use my skills in ways that I do not think my God would approve of. Sure, I could take a few hundred dollars today and take the tests to be certified as a PC technician, or a network manager, or a Linux systems administrator. All I have to is decide that that certification is more important than feeding the homeless and hungry man that is sitting beside me. I just have to decide that I’m better than him and deserve more and get on that cycle of greed.
There are probably a lot of people around me that are very uncomfortable because of me and the things I say, but I would ask them to first remove the beams from their eyes that they would be better able to help me remove the mite from my eye. I keep speaking the truth, and I keep quoting scripture, just like a guy two thousand years ago did, and I’m pretty sure these people will eventually do to me the same thing that the good people back then did to Him in one way or another.
Two thousand years, and the Lord’s people still haven’t learned one simple lesson:
Grace isn’t just a thing that you receive from your God, it’s also a gift that you were supposed to give to your fellow man, just as our Lord commanded us to do.
That’s all for now, Maybe more later.
