Emanuel

I do not have good news on the help-the-homeless front. When I went to the Walmart parking lot to pick him up, he was there, but told me that his sister was putting together a bag of clothes for him and she would be there in one hour to drive him to Santa Fe. It has now been 5 hours and 55 minutes, and he has not yet shown up in Santa Fe.

For the first time since I have known him, he was physically unstable today. I told him I noticed it and he told me he had spent the night in the hospital and that it is “It’s a long, complicated story.” I did not ask him, but I suspect he celebrated with some kind of drugs last night.

In his wonderful book entitled Loving Each Other, Leo Buscaglia wrote, “We have a very human need to believe, to trust each other. I think we’d go mad if we felt there was no one we could trust. It is through trust that our value systems grow and change. With the security and reassurance arising from trust we become more open to risk.

Living on the street one learns there are few if any people one can trust. Deception becomes even more of a way of life than it does for the rest of us who are not homeless, although we all wrestle with the issue of honesty. I trust the people I have talked with at the Life Changers Community Outreach Center near Gallup, New Mexico. They won’t give up on Emanuel, and neither will I. The word Emanuel, by the way, comes from a Hebrew word, meaning “God is with us.”