Thoughts on hope, from a formerly homeless man. (Spoiler...Obama didn't give me my hope)

      “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12

Today marks the 73^rd day I’ve been employed here at Liberty University. For six years I struggled to find work while living as a homeless man. I’m intelligent, very hard working, willing, and able. I took anything offered while looking for the “perfect” job. I’ve built chicken coops and pressure washed driveways and even cleaned windows for a hundred bucks.

When I first lost my job in 2008, I refused to collect unemployment. I’m old school and I wanted to work my way out of it. A friend reminded me that state unemployment is insurance. It’s a policy you have been paying into since the day you started working on a W2 basis. For me that was since age 15 when I worked at the local Gino’s restaurant. He told me this was my money; I had been paying into the fund and paying for others when they were having a hard time and so I should take what I’d earned. So I did. That lasted about six months. After that I was told to enroll for the federal unemployment program. This I refused. Federal unemployment is taxpayer funded and it wasn’t money I had worked for. That’s how I saw it, at least and so I refused. I refused food stamps and Section 8 housing too.

I am entirely convinced that this stubborn refusal to accept a handout was the reason I kept trying to solve the problems instead of simply giving up and becoming a shame-filled, broken, humiliated dad, who lost any shred of hope and was enslaved by the system. I didn’t do that. It doesn’t make me a hero. But it makes me different from a lot of folks these days.

Sadly, the long, drawn out battle also stripped me of something besides my dignity and pride. It dimmed my hope. I’ve always been an optimist. So much so that my friends would frequently have to reel me back in from taking leaps of faith because I always saw everything as an opportunity, every person as basically good, every day as a new chance. Six years of homelessness, broken dreams and mostly deferred hope, changed that.

Most of my life I was the funniest guy in the room. I was always singing a song, if not out loud, at least in my heart. I was quick with a smile, just as quick to laugh, and quicker to forgive. I had a long fuse and a thick skin. I had the same passions and the same bedrock values, but I didn’t defend them with the edge and the anger that, sadly, became more and more prevalent as the last six years progressed.

But as the years dragged on, my heart grew sicker and sicker. This verse is one of the most perfect observations of humanity in the entire Bible. I think that I will ask Solomon one day; “What were you observing when you recorded this bit of wisdom? Whose life had been so badly shattered, who was it in your administration, or your family, who had been beaten and defeated for such a long time that you literally saw his heart getting sick?” That’s something to ponder for a lifetime.

I’ve lived this for the last six years. I saw my own heart grow colder and harder and sicker as time wore on. Each day, the scar tissue got thicker and the flame grew more dim and the warmth turned tepid. The laughter was gone. The jokes weren’t funny anymore, the smile faded. In their place were tears, anger, a short temper, words that hurt more than encouraged, and almost no optimism. I became an almost entirely different person than I had been for the forty-five years prior.

I started my job on August 18^th. The first month or so I had some difficulty adjusting. I was very wary of people. I had not been in a daily social setting since 2008 and it is sad how you can get out of practice when you live in such an isolated way as I had been. I told a coworker today that I understand why homeless people talk to themselves so much. It’s because nobody else talks to them. We aren’t made to be so isolated, and it eventually renders every other person an intruder. I think that’s the real danger of so many mobile devices. We walk around texting, reading email, Facebooking or checking sports scores with our heads down looking at a six-square-inch screen and we are quickly becoming a world full of individuals without recognition of anyone else. We don’t see people as people anymore…we see them as Twitter handles, Facebook “friends” or “Selfie-Stars” (That is officially MY term. Don’t you rascals steal it)

I was living like Will Smith in “I am Legend” walking alone through my own personal post-apocalyptic world and talking with mannequins to fight the sheer loneliness of my life. The hope had been deferred for so long that my heartsickness was almost terminal.

It took a month for me to begin to feel like my old self again. It took another two weeks after that to really feel comfortable around my coworkers and begin to crack jokes or say hello in the hallway or smile. But it has happened. It’s wonderful that, while six years of damage was done, it only took two months to restore so much life to my soul. I have a lot of hope again. But I will never forget what hopelessness feels like.

When I began this journey six years ago, our nation had just elected a man who promised “Hope.” He was wrong. We have less hope now than ever before. We are more changed and less hopeful and, sadly, more broken as a society and less united as a country than ever in our history. Obama failed. But as much as I dislike this president and his politics and his personal beliefs, I’m not blaming him entirely. We should have known better. No president…NO president, can simply imbue hope in the hearts of people by passing laws or passing out money. You can’t give hope. Only God can do that. What we can do for each other is cultivate hope; we can fertilize it and protect it for each other. But we can’t grant it. Reagan never tried to give us hope…he pointed us within ourselves and told us how to find the hope we had already.

People don’t need free money, free cell phones or free health care. They need a job. They need a purpose. They need a dream that pushes them and they need a reason to believe that they can –with hard work- achieve that dream. They need opportunity. I finally got an opportunity and it made all the difference.

I feel my heart healing at light speed and it makes me happy, but it also makes me sad. I hurt people while my heart was so hardened and my hope was so deferred. I have asked forgiveness from those I needed to ask and I’ve received it for the most part but it still makes me sad. It makes me sad for a lot of others out there who are also feeling their heart shutting down day by day, and because of this, they are running people off when they really need their company. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. A sick heart shuts off the light of the soul. I have hope again but I wonder about those who do not.

Remember this when you interact with someone who has been losing hope for a long time. Remember this when they bark at you or snipe at you or simply walk past you without a smile or a nod. They aren’t trying to be monsters…they’re simply heartsick. They need hope. Not a government program, or a free check or a cell phone or a handout. They need a reason. They need a purpose. They need to feel like real productive people again. They need to come home to a house they are paying for, sit at a table they bought, eat groceries they didn’t buy with a “SNAP” card, and sink into their own bed, feeling worn out but thankful for work and for the promise that tomorrow brings.

That…is hope. Without it, there is only sickness.

Crumbling under the weight...why I'm so open with my story.

*I've never "dedicated" a blog article before. But I'm going to with this one. This article...and hopefully the awareness it stirs...is for those for whom this journey became too hard. The weight became too heavy, The night too dark...

...and the loneliness too lonely. You weren't alone after all...

My “Open Letter to Obama” has gotten some attention, that’s for certain. Attention from some in the media, thousands on Twitter and Facebook, and the blogosphere.

But one group of people has been paying attention to this letter, and subsequently to my plight, with particular interest. It’s the people who have been or currently are in, the same situation.

If you get a moment, go back to that article (An Open Letter To President Obama) Link is here: Open Letter and read the comments. These are real people. People who owned homes, and had dreams, and lived lives. They aren't lazy, or slackers, or stupid people. They weren't drug abusers or alcoholics. They probably weren't “In over their heads”  financially. One man has an advanced degree. One lady faced severe physical health issues.

Last night, I got a message from a friend on Twitter. Her brother in law committed suicide two years ago because of a situation almost exactly like mine. She told me that she wished he could have read my article, because who knows but that it might have stopped that tragedy.

I have, in the past, been accused of being too honest in my writing. People wonder why I lay my soul out there for public scrutiny. It’s because of notes like that. It’s because countless times over the past 6 years I have been writing and blogging and telling my story –first of being a single dad and the man’s side of a painful divorce, then of homelessness- and I have heard from the broken. I have collected hundreds of emails, and comments from men who didn't want their divorce. Who loved their wife and adored their family and wanted only to be a good husband and father. The overwhelming majority of the time a man finds my divorced dad’s blog, he uses some variant of the search “Divorced dad...missing my kids.” Most of the time these searches come at very early hours...2 or 3 AM. I imagine it’s a sleepless daddy who is so broken and so consumed with longing for his children that he types those words in a search engine just hoping that whatever bounces back brings him comfort.

Hearing of this dad who could not face another day in a world that saw him as a failure broke my heart. It broke my heart because it reveals a lot about this nation and it’s moral compass.

We live in a country now, where being a man means having the world on your shoulders. And if you stumble and fall, you are a failure. Zig Ziglar often said “Failure is an event...not a person.” But sadly...old Zig doesn't speak for this America. He did, for a long time men like Zig expressed the heart of this country. But we've become a jagged, fractured, disconnected collection of individuals and personal goals. We don’t live in neighborhoods anymore. We live in clusters of houses. Bunkers. Beautiful, well decorated, immaculately landscaped prisons of individuality and isolation. Cookouts and block parties are a thing of the past. And with them...friendship. With them, a caring, concerned sense of community and belonging.

When you separate everyone into little fractured piles of individuality and selfishness, when you pit race against race, class against class, and heritage against heritage...you get isolated people. You kill community. You destroy neighborhoods. We have a President right now who relishes in this. A man who has made it an art form to divide us against each other. White against black. Black against white. Conservative black against liberal black, against Hispanic, against Catholic, against left-handed Americans of German ancestry, born on Tuesdays between 1953 and 2011. He has us in 350 million phone booths, broken apart from each other.

When that happens...when a nation united becomes a nation untied...a place where 350 million people just live side by side without ever becoming real honest friends...then broken hearted dads who face hard times find no hope, and they kill themselves.

Let me tell you a little of how hard this is.

One time, fairly early in this homeless walk of mine, I went to my daughter’s school to have lunch with her. She was in the sixth grade. We had a blast together at her lunch table, as we always did. I was always in the habit of having lunch with her at least once a week as it was. But after being homeless, I did it a little more frequently when I could, because it gave us more time together.

I left her school and got in my car and drove off. About a mile down the road, I had to pull over. A wave of grief came over me and I knew a meltdown was coming. I pulled into a parking lot and broke down into deep, body-wracking sobs. Why? Because walking out of her school that day, the thought came over me in a terrible, dreadful flood: “What if one of her friends finds out I’m homeless? What if they start teasing her because of it?” It was more than my daddy’s heart could bear. I wept loudly for probably 15 minutes.

In the first few days after losing my home, a friend let Morgan and I use a loft apartment over their barn to stay in. It had a bathroom and shower and a living room. We slept on air mattresses. She was barely 10 years old. It was sort of an adventure to her and I don’t know that she quite comprehended what it meant when I said we weren't living at our house anymore.

We had a beautiful cat named Giacomo. Jackie had to be boarded at this point. She missed her cat, but she figured this was all temporary (as I did too) and so she figured that in a short time we’d have Jackie back, and our two Springer Spaniels, and we’d be a happy family again. She spent the weekend at a friends house during this time we stayed in the loft. When I picked her up, she explained that her friend’s mom had a yard sale that weekend and she had purchased two framed pictures. They were hand-drawn sketches of a cat. A cat that looked a lot like Giacomo. We got back to the loft and she propped them up against the wall at the head of her air mattress. When I saw them the next morning, I had to go outside because it so broke my heart and I didn't want her to see me crying. When I close my eyes I still see those two pictures, places carefully at the end of her mattress. Little framed reminders of the cat she was missing. I might never be able to forgive myself for my daughter not having her pets anymore.

If you want to know how this stuff hits a man...there you have it.

I have fallen to sleep in tears, in the middle of the winter (the coldest temps I have ever slept in, in the car, was about 17 degrees) and woken up with ice on my face. Every single day that goes by without a home for my daughter to come to is something I can literally feel escaping my grasp. I watch her growing up from afar...without a room of her own in a her dad’s house. If you want to know what will make a man feel like an abysmal failure...that is it. I have cried more tears than I could ever count. I have stopped making promises to her, because time and again, things happen like being frozen out of a job because of hiring moratoriums.

I don’t smile much. I have become thin-skinned and angry a lot. I used to be the class-clown.  Hearing about a man who broke down and couldn't take it anymore is no surprise. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never considered whether my daughter wouldn't be better off without her failed dad. That’s how it feels sometimes. I have received mostly wonderful, kind, encouraging comments. But I have also received comments from vicious, mean-spirited, unkind, unChristlike people who are convinced that somehow, someway this is all my fault, and all because I don’t want to work. I have worked since I took my first paper route at age 11. I have never been without a job. Never. Not. Ever. Until 2008.

Next week I turn 50. Maybe that’s got a lot to do with me not getting hired, I don’t know.

But this sure isn’t what I thought 50 would look like.

So if you read my blogs or hear me talking somewhere...don’t attack me for being blunt and honest. Re-read what I just wrote. Ask yourself if you knew how homelessness felt before reading it. Ask yourself if you found yourself in this situation, would it feel better knowing someone else was out there, walking this same path?

I write these things for you. So you know how this affects people in this situation. But I also write it for the others in this situation. Because maybe, had this story been out there two years ago, maybe my friend’s brother-in-law wouldn't have lost hope altogether. Maybe a family wouldn't be grieving still.

God bless us, every one.

Random thoughts from a Homeless Dad

Yesterday a friend of mine told me how he had just watched the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" and how they showed some of the techniques used to extract the information used to find Bin Laden.
He said, "You know...the final breaking happens when they torture these guys for days or weeks or months and then they stop. They clean them up. Give them better food. Stop the sleep deprivation and whatever else they were doing. They let them gain a glimmer of hope that perhaps they have endured the worst nightmare they could imagine, then just when they start to grasp that hope...they start it all again."  He told me that according to the film, the breaking happens quickly after that, because they dropped their guard and began to hope. Once that faint glimmer was extinguished, their fight is all gone. Then he said something I'd been feeling since February but couldn't quite understand, he said, "You know...that's what happened to you. That's why this is so much harder this time. You endured that for four years, worked your butt off got your degree, wrote two books and started a business and got yourself in a house. Then the wheels came back off. It has to hurt worse than before...much worse"
He's right. It does. I didn't know about this being a tactic of inquisition...I just thought it was a particularly cruel twist. It hurts and it hurts like nothing I can describe.
     I picked up my daughter after school today. I do this every day to help her mom out. To be honest...it's something I look forward to. It makes me feel like I'm still her dad. Like I'm doing something. I spend about 20 minutes with her every afternoon, driving from school to her mom's house. She is usually burnt out after school so we don't talk as much as I'd like.  But I get to see her and for me, that's everything. I can't put into words how much I love my daughter. How much I wish I could get out of this nightmare and make something of a life for us again. How much I would give to hear her saying bedtime prayers, to cook breakfast for her, or to help her with her homework. This life of my hurts. It's painful. I'm past the point of dreaming dreams for myself anymore but I sure dream them for her. I dream of her being happy and fulfilled and becoming who she was put here to be. 15 years ago, when the doctor put her in my arms I felt the enormous weight of being the person who was supposed to make the way for her. It's her job to dream the dreams...it's mine to give them wings. And I can't.
I look at a $20 bill and try to figure a way to make it stretch into a tank of gas and some food, while our erstwhile president is partying like a rockstar this week. I am losing hope...and something had better change.
Meanwhile my daughter races toward adulthood and I am almost the invisible man in her world. She loves me and respects me and appreciates the sacrifice I made to remain here in Nashville and in her life. But she can't live on the intangible forever, and neither can I. Something has to break my way. More importantly...it has to break her way. Her dad needs to find the success he once knew, and he needs to find it now. Because time is racing by like the wind. I can't describe how I miss her and the five years we have lost. I lived in my car and tried to rebuild. I studied and got my degree. I wrote three books. I started a little business. And for all that, I am back to sleeping in the car again...and this time the shame and humiliation is killing me. It is literally draining life from my heart. It hurts to live like this. In ways I can't describe properly enough to do them justice. You will never know what it is to lose your career, and your home, and your family. Most people experience one of those...maybe two. But few ever experience all three together. I have. It hurts. Physically hurts...I feel like I am lugging around a 300 pound man strapped across my shoulders. The shame and humiliation is palpable. But the lack of hope is the worst thing. How do I get that back?
I just want my daughter to be happy. And I want to be there to see it. I'm losing the ability to imagine that day.