Bums

Today, they call them homeless.And they are people living in tents, or just pieces of plastic put together somehow and I feel so sorry for them. But I feel anger for some of them too because they are tearing up our streets and parks. The city doesn’t know what to do about this huge problem. They would build and revamp some buildings and try to get themto move in but many of the people don’t want to live in them. We all try to help them by giving them food, blankets and clothing, but that doesn’t seem to help much either. They need a complete change in their thinking. They need God more than anything.Folks have tried to talk to them, telling them God loves them and there is a better way to live. The sad thing is, I have seen children running around there too. There must be something we can do.

We had plenty of bums in the Thirties. They built their camps near railroads so it would be easy to jump on one of the railroad cars to get to another camp. Mama would tell us never to go near the bum’s camp but we went anyhow. Their camp was always neat. In the middle of the camp was a huge campfire where they cooked their stew. My girlfriend and I tasted one of their stews once and it was very good. Around the fire a private place was set for each person’s bed and a box for belongings. They often sang songs and told stories. We always joined in. most of them were songs of the Cival War.

How did the bum’s get the vegetables to make the stews, you ask? Well, they went around to homes that had a big garden and asked if they could work in the garden for some of the vegetables. Daddy was always happy to have someone work his garden! Then they would take the vegetables back to the camp where they made their stew. Sometimes, they asked if there was some work they could do for a meal. Farmers brought us logs of wood in the fall of the year. Daddy was the Pastor of the church, and the farmers couldn’t pay money to the church, so they brought enough logs to heat the church and our parsonage. Daddy was happyto have the bum’s come and saw some of the logs too. He thought sawing wood was really hard work.

One time Daddy was not very happy with the bums. We were leaving on a vacation so he put his preaching clothes neatly hanging in his closet. While we were gone, a bum took his preaching clothes and left his old clothes hanging just as neatly as Daddy had. That has always been a story Daddy told in his sermons.

Times have really changed, haven’t they? Oh, I suppose we wouldn’t want to leave our handy gagets in order to go back, but I believe it wouldn’t hurt to change some of our thinking, don’t you? First of all, we need to think those homeless people are just as good as we are. the New Testament in our Bibles tells us that a man, who was an enemy of the country, was left in a ditch, beat up badly by some men who didn’t like him being in their country. A priest and a well dressed man walked by, seeing the tortured man, but walked passed him. A countryman came by, picked the man up, put him in a hotel and told the hotel manager he would pay all the costs for the man when he returned the next week. That’s the way we should be. Jesus says we should love our neighbor as ourselves. And He meant everybody. Let’s start there, shall we?