Summary: We’re being led to transition into a weekly outreach that finds people where they are. And with that, I wrestle honestly with the risks, costs, and uncertainties involved. Despite the flash flood, we show up for our outreach anyway, just in time for the rain to stop.

Read Time: Six minutes

There was such a downpour that some compact cars parked on the side of the street were taking in water. I was driving down the same street, thankfully in a full-size truck high enough for the water’s surface to skim the underbelly. I’m towing a worn but seemingly floating trailer loaded with at least a thousand pounds of nonperishable food, hygiene supplies, and other necessities that people depend on us to bring every month.

The windshield wipers are struggling to keep up. I guess this wasn’t God’s will.

Nobody was going to show up for our outreach in this weather. Especially not the heavy hitters. There was a “Resource Fair” planned to set up aside us, with names like United Way, Humana, and River Valley Behavioral Health. They had to cancel, honestly, they’re not set up to do this in the rain.

I kind of knew this would have to happen eventually. We’ve been doing this for years, and while we’ve gotten rained on, we’ve not let that stop us. We show up no matter what. Since it had been raining on and off all week, we had devised a plan to deploy under a small awning with just a table or two.  In the off chance someone shows up.

In my life, God waits till what I think is the last second. Like how it quit raining when we arrived at the Cadillac Motel, our distribution point. As our city’s overwhelmed storm drainage system reclaimed our downtown streets, our people started showing up. Like they always do.

Tons of people, who, if they chose to, walked away with enough food for seven days.

But there’s something missing. It’s not complete. Now that the camps are gone, we’re seeing our people on the streets. But they’re accompanied by new people we haven’t seen before. I’m no longer lacing up my boots and disappearing into the woods. I don’t spend the next couple of hours walking trails, checking on people, or sitting on a log talking with someone who’s had a rough week. For the first time in years, the outreach feels… unfinished.

Now I notice them everywhere. Maybe it’s because they’re scattered throughout the city now. Or maybe it’s because the dangerously hot and humid days make those living outside harder to miss. A good example of that would be earlier today. My wife and I were waiting at a light in front of a business, and observed a couple. The girl is standing in the narrow shade of a towering business sign. The young man walks in a circle, frustrated and defiant in the face of the sun beating down. Neither of them has water, nor a dry stitch of clothing.

It’s not the last Saturday of the month, so technically “we’re not on duty”. I drive on anyway. We’ve had a surge of people reaching out to us on social media, asking for specific things. And telling them they’ve got to wait three weeks feels a lot like that.

I’ve wanted our outreach to feel normal again. But it’s not going to.

So, because of all that, it’s time for Just People to pivot a little. Instead of sending the provisioning torpedo into camp once a month as we used to, it’s time for us to go find them. And others, on a more regular basis.

Therefore, once a week, a small mobile unit will do that. We’ll stop and give water to those baking in the sun. And if they need it, something to eat. Maybe a tent, tarp, and a sleeping bag to help with the unforgiving hard ground. A wagon to haul their stuff. A bus ticket to get from one end of town to the other, with air conditioning.

We will continue to share their stories with you; that’s not changing. In fact, it’s even more important than it was before. As we go looking for people during the week, we’ll take you with us. You’ll meet who we meet, hear their stories, and know that if you gave something like a wagon, it got where we said it would.

It makes sense, right? We’ve been doing this for a while now, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it. We have the infrastructure. We have the equipment. More importantly, we’ve spent years building relationships and earning trust within their community. We know where many of these people are, and we know that there are many more we haven’t met yet.

Doesn’t that sound lovely?

Then reality starts talking.

The plan, apparently, is for me to leave the computer shop one day a week, go looking for people scattered all over the city, and provide whatever I can at the moment. If my business is struggling, how does my not being there help that?

The one Tuesday becomes every Tuesday. Then someone calls on Thursday because they’re stranded across town. Before long, the outreach that was supposed to fit around the business begins swallowing the business that makes the outreach possible in the first place.

That isn’t pessimism. It’s history.

And then I start thinking about the part of all this that I hate.

Somebody has to pay for it.

I know how ministries survive. They ask people to become recurring supporters. Every time I think about that, I cringe. I just never wanted to become that guy.

There’s a part of me that would love nothing more than to spend my life finding people who have been pushed to the edges and simply loving them well. To spend my days doing that almost sounds absurd. In fact, I’d probably call it dangerously optimistic. It’s the kind of foolishness that’s gotten me in trouble before.

Or maybe it’s exactly the kind of thing God has always had to drag me into.

Either way, I’ve learned something over the years. If this is truly where He’s leading, He’ll provide. It’s been an unfortunate reality in my history because it almost always involves me doing something extremely uncomfortable. Like living outside for a moment with our people, or leasing a building that makes no financial sense. Crazy things like that.

It just never looks like I think it will, and it almost never happens in my time instead of His.

And if this isn’t His idea after all, then it’ll collapse under its own weight.

And if it is….

All of the real names used here were used with permission. Otherwise, the names have been changed. To protect the identity of those photographed, they have been blurred intentionally unless consent was given before publishing.