Cardboard is Pretty Great

The last two nights, I slept outside in the streets.  When I told Nate that I would go to NYC with him this summer, I told him that I was, "All in," and I joined in his vision.  When our friend David Lane shared with Nate his vision about experiencing homelessness by sleeping on the streets, we went all in and joined in David's vision.  We told him that we would be the hands and feet of Jesus together and that is what we have done.

On Sunday, David got dropped off in front of the Bowery.  After picking up some snacks, we popped popcorn and drank soda with some guys in the Bowery and watched Brazil shut out Spain to win the Confederation Cup.  Then we went to Hillsong NYC for their last service at 9pm.  During the service they have "Four Minutes of Fellowship" and Nate met a guy in front of us named Brendan who had given his life to the Lord and actually worked at MontLawn last summer so he was pumped to hear that we had just come from there.  Church was good but after the service was better.  Brendan wanted to bless us after hearing our story.  He said, "I have $20 in my bank account but I want to take you all to get frozen yogurt."  That's when we met Andrew outside.

Andrew had two bags of food in his hand that he had gotten from Starbucks and asked us, "Do you want to go pass out this food in the parks with me?" Little did he know that we were about to spend the night under the Williamsburg Bridge.  We told him yes.  He ended up leaving the food with Brendan, his friends Mikayla & Michelle, and Nate, David, and I and we all passed out together.  We met Sophie and Daniel.  We all parted ways after getting Slurpees and continued on towards our night.

Heading towards the bridge, we picked up some cardboard and walked towards the bridge.  We found a spot under a cat walk and laid down our cardboard.  Our air conditioning was the cars going 60mph next to our heads and our alarm clock was the people who jogged by in the early morning, our nightlight was the street light, our mattress was cardboard, and our Yankee Candle air freshner was our sweat and BO.  We gave up our comforts to experience what it felt like to be homeless.  We didn't do it to tell people and show off, we did it because it is a reality for a large majority of people in the City and around the world.

The only difference between these people and us is we have homes to go back to and we were in a group of friends.  When we woke up in the morning we talked about how lonely we would have been without one another and I realized that loneliness is an aspect of homelessness that we usually don't realize or think about.  Just because they are all out there doesn't mean they are altogether.

In the morning we sat by the bay and enjoyed the peaceful cool morning and knew in our hearts that this was only the beginning of the experience and we had only scratched the surface of many's reality.

We will never look at cardboard the same.