living in hope

Imagine what it would be like to feel absolutely invisible, worthless, rejected, shafted by a constant stream of people day in and day out passing you by. Dodging you and resenting you like one does a pothole in the middle of the street. Imagine what that does to someone soul, to someone’ self-worth, to their motivation and hope, to feel inadequate, repulsive, worthless and nameless by societies standards. I don’t think I can even picture what that would feel like, could you?

         When reading this, it is easy to think of how horrible it is that people would ever feel like so low. An immediate thought is that I could never be able to do that intentionally to someone else. But in reality, we do this very thing to people every single day when we pass them by on the street. When we walk down Spring Garden Road or Barrington avoiding eye contact with the folk who stand or sit on sidewalks with cups in their hands, to the person on the bus who looks a little rough around the edges and we choose to stand rather than sit next to them, scoffing at the crowd of people waiting in line to get into the soup kitchen. I am not here to play the blame game, or to make you feel like a horrible person. I want to share with you a hope I have, for restoration, for community to develop and form, for a change to take place on our city streets.

          These people we judge and avoid, cast out of society and in ignorance banished out of sight and out of mind belong to someone’s family. They are someone’s sister or brother, mother or father, son or daughter. Does thinking about people in this way change anything for you? Seeing these people, and that is what they are, people, as easily being a member of your family. They could be your mother or father, your sister, or brother. They could be your little girl, or your little boy. It would be inconceivable to imagine what it would feel like, to know your loved one felt so hurt and rejected day in and day out.

What if, we as the people of Halifax began to see people for who they are and not by where they are found!

What is it in life that we all want and need? It is nice to have a roof over our heads, to have clothes on our back, three square meals a day, to have a secure income and all the luxuries life may give us. But really, what we desire and strive to have is a community. We desire to be known and understood, to feel like we have people on our side that will root for us even when we don’t believe in ourselves. We crave connection with others, and when this is lacking, we long for it. That is something we can all relate to regardless of how we spend our days, or where we sleep at night.

What if, next time you walk down one of our city streets, rather than passing people by, you stop and greet them. Learn their name; ask them how their day is going, look them in the eye not out of sympathy, but because you genuinely care about them. Buy them a coffee, or hand them a granola bar. Acknowledge their existence and show them that they matter.

If that isn’t enough for you, try out a soup kitchen or seek out places where you can volunteer your time serving in the community. If you choose to do this, I challenge you to get to know people in the community. What if we learned people’s names, so that we could share life with them, and to show that we care about whom they are and are not tainted by where they have come from. What if we lavished them in love like we would love a brother or a sister or a member of our own family.

When we feel cared for, when we feel like we matter and are valued by others, we begin to have faith in ourselves, that we can change, that we are capable of doing bigger better things. You may not feel like you can do all that much, you may not feel like little ol’ you can have that much of an impact on our community and creating change in our city. But even doing the small things can make a big difference. Talking to someone, and showing that you care, that has value, that has the potential to in still confidence in someone to begin to believe they matter, that they are worth something, and that they too could do something with their life.

My hope is that the people in our city will feel valued, rather than worthless, that they will be known by name, rather than dejected, that they will be welcomed into community, that they will feel as if they matter and are loved.

We just need to step out of our comfort zones, join in community with others to reach out and erase the labels these people have been given in the past, and show that we as a city care for one another.
         I dare you, to move, to love, and like Ghandi said, to be the change you want to see in the world. We can do it. I believe in you. I believe in us.