The Portion of my Inheritance

He feel asleep on the couch and his dad tried to wake him up to go to bed, but he wouldn’t budge.  I worried that he would get too cold, so I covered him with a blanket and turned the heater up a couple of degrees, then found my own way to bed.

I couldn’t sleep, I thought he would get cold out there, the fire had died out and the temperature had been really dropping at night.  

Then my thoughts turned towards them. After the last 4 1/2 years I could not ever lay in my comfy warm bed without thinking about them.

I have seen them, lined up side by side along the street, stretched out for the night. They are the overflow of the surrounding shelters that already held it’s limits.

I read about it today, that for Christmas night a hotel in Dallas housed 500 homeless people. For just that night they had a warm bed, a hot meal and a place to get out of the freezing cold.  

On the last trip to the streets I met a mother of four, homeless. Her 8 year old daughter stood there with us as she talked. She told me she had lost her home a few months back and they were waiting to get into the women’s and children’s shelter. Through her tears she told me they could stay at one place but they would not allow her 16 year old son to stay and she couldn’t leave him.  I prayed with her and promised to continue praying, and I just can’t stop thinking about them. 

How do you hunker down in ice and snow? How do you console your children at Christmas when there is no place to lay your head and no place to get out from under the icy breath of the arctic air that blows through your layers and bites your bones.

How do you keep going back time and time again to the same stories that rip your heart out?  How can you not?  Didn’t He tell us to go?

But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?  My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.  1 John 3: 17-18

And doesn’t He tell us that whatever we do for the least of these, we do it for Him?

“Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; ‘for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.”   Matthew 25:34-36

He who oppresses the poor reproaches his Maker, But he who honors Him has mercy on the needy.  Proverbs 14:31