Homeless camp clean-up
posted: June 14, 2008 | category: community, faith, homelessness
tags: day center, homeless news
After talking to a cop friend earlier this week, I found out that the camp of some homeless friends needed cleaning. So the NightWatch team spent a few hours in the woods this afternoon. To protect privacy and anonymity, we don’t usually take photos. But I did take a little “before and after” picture of one small area of the camp:
The area in front of the tent before:
And after:
Our team of a more than a dozen volunteers filled up bag after bag of bottles, cans, discarded clothing and assorted trash. We filled up one truck bed:
And then another:
And then we went back for the third load. But here’s how cool God is to us. We got the last bag off the final truckload just as the first raindrops from the afternoon’s thunderstorms began to fall — just in time to wash the truck bed clean! God is always right on time. 
A little later, as I stood under a hot shower and washed away the mess and the smell, I thought about how even though our friends’ camp looks so much better now, they’re not taking a hot shower or changing into fresh, clean clothes. They’re still outside. In a cleaner camp, but still…
Our friends were grateful to get help cleaning up the camp. One kept trying to apologize for the evidence of addiction all around us. I told him we were there to clean, not to judge. Addiction is so hard. Some of us have known him for a while. Long story. And that’s OK. I’m so thankful that God keeps giving us opportunities to love people in real and practical ways. So often, that doesn’t seem like enough to me. I want to “fix” everything. I can’t. I know. So thank you, God, for letting us show love to our friends. I’m praying for the day when…
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[…] had lunch today with one of the friends who helped with the homeless camp cleanup this weekend. She told me that as we bagged up hundreds of empty 40 ounce beer bottles, she was hit […]
[…] a homeless camp that needed to be cleaned up. A team of us went out and cleaned it. See the results here. Then, a few weeks ago, I got a call from a City staffer who told me that neighbors had complained […]