I’ve thought more about what Jesus would do in the last five months than I have since those bracelets were all the rage in the late ‘90s.
Heading to an event this week, I realized I was going to be awkwardly early instead of fashionably late, so I took a detour to an area where homeless encampments had frustrated residents and restaurants nearby.
Near a highway exit, the chain hotels and chain restaurants caught travelers from the interstate. The loneliness of asphalt only held life by those pushing shopping carts under the midday heat, otherwise surrounded by massive vehicles that only went around those pushing their load in the middle of the side streets. The area was more recently developed, in the last 20 years. The overly wide streets, almost industrial-sized, were flanked by parking lots and strip malls that make up the stark, modern, sprawling urban design.
I noted the businesses: Applebee’s, Golden Corral, Mc-Donald’s, and, strangely, General Dynamics. Mixed in were two churches I hadn’t heard of before, spread between several previously separate and merged business spaces. Perhaps it was like CVS and Walgreens. Maybe one church wanted to rely on the market research of the other.
The undeveloped lots were empty of encampments, and what seemed like a new sign — No Trespass, No Loitering per Ordinance — towered in the stretch of dirt. The stone benches of one of the churches, in sight of the lot, were also empty.
It was the same area I had toured with a resident a few months back. We walked the land near his house, and he spoke about the problems he had had with people cutting the fence into the city land behind his house, a wide expanse that used to be a well-loved lake for recreation that had been part of a way to capture floodwater. There hadn’t been a flood in a very long time.
At the end of the tour, we walked by a small city water facility. The resident explained that the homeless had broken into the walled-off area — maybe the size of a large living room — to “charge their phones.” I nodded, seeing parts of the metal gate dented.
“I mean, they also go into it to try and find water,” he said. “But look at how they’ve creatively used the tumbleweeds to block the door and that great new concertina wire on top.”
Or, we could put a water faucet on the outside wall. And, another silent thought: what would be the most humane, the most human, and also, the most divine?
WWJD. I’m not sure he’d use concertina wire.
A few weeks later, I toured a private food bank. It was relatively new, on the opposite side of town, in a different stretch of the desert where local developers were building, building, building into the vastness where they only saw how tract homes would give life. Smooth new pavement was the oasis vision.
The food bank volunteers, all church-affiliated, spoke about how they also delivered food to different locations in the region. I was surprised by the distances they traveled; had they considered a more permanent location in the bigger city down the interstate as well?
“We had a location there before,” said the volunteer, framed by the larger-than-lifesize portrait of Jesus on the wall behind them. “But, there were too many homeless there.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Cassie McClure is a writer, wife, mother, daughter, fan of the Oxford comma, and drinker of tequila. Some of those things relate. Contact her at cassie@mcclurepublications.com.)
