Some of our neighbors have nowhere to lay their head

This series is named for the Jericho Road, where in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, a man was beaten and left on the side of the road, and for Martin Luther King Jr.’s insistence that we eventually have to ask why that road keeps producing victims.

I never expected to find that story so literally true. On a recent Saturday morning, my husband and I were jogging downtown in the rain when we came upon what looked like a pile of clothes lying in the middle of the street. As we got closer, we realized it was, in fact, a person.

My husband recognized him immediately. A few times over the last year, he had driven this man home to an uninsulated shed he shares with his brother. The man has no legs.

As we waited for the police to transport him home, I was struck not simply by the fact that our neighbor was living this way, but by how normal it had become. A man with no legs was living in an uninsulated shed, and somehow, we had learned to accept that as something other than an emergency.

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A home is where ordinary life happens. Children do homework. Families eat dinner. People recover from illness, grieve, rest, and begin again. Nearly every other part of life becomes harder when you do not know where you will sleep.

According to United For ALICE, more than half of Sumter County households live in poverty (17%) or earn too little to afford basic expenses (35%). Nearly half of renters are already cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing, according to census estimates.

Yet in South Carolina, a household may be limited to $3,000 in countable resources to retain federal food assistance, barely enough to cover a deposit, moving expenses, and the first month’s rent.

Families are expected to save their way toward stability while some of the assistance they depend on limits their ability to do so.

Throughout the country, a home has become more than shelter; it is also one of the primary ways to build wealth. Too often, that wealth is extracted from families with the least to spare.

When rents rise faster than wages, the families least able to absorb the increase are the first to lose the place they call home.

It is common to think of homelessness as the result of bad choices. Sometimes choices do play a role. But it also happens when a spouse dies, someone becomes sick or disabled, an abuser controls the finances, or rent rises while wages do not.

For many South Carolina families, homelessness begins long before someone arrives at a shelter’s doorstep. Often, it begins with an eviction notice.

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Just five days after a missed rent payment, a landlord can begin the eviction process.

That filing can follow a family for years, making the next landlord less likely to rent to them. A friend’s couch, then a relative’s spare room, then a motel room; each stop a desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of homelessness.

Becoming homeless is rarely the result of one dramatic event. More often, it is a series of seemingly innocuous setbacks that gather momentum until there is nowhere left to turn.

These are not people unwilling to work. They are people doing everything they can to survive.

For some women, the reason they are doing all of this is one we still do not talk about honestly enough: domestic violence.

Nationwide, roughly half of all women experiencing homelessness report that domestic or sexual violence directly caused them to lose their housing. Leaving is often the safest decision they can make, but it is also the beginning of an entirely different crisis.

There’s a story that has shaped how I think about this more than any data point has. It begins with a family searching for somewhere safe to stay and finding no room. Jesus entered the world without stable housing and, in the Gospel of Matthew, says of himself, ‘Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’

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Years ago, our family started making blessing bags instead of exchanging Christmas gifts.

We filled them with water, snacks, toiletries, hand warmers, and handwritten notes, keeping them in the backseat of the car to hand out at traffic lights.

I still believe those bags matter. But now I hope my children ask a different question. “Why do so many of our neighbors need them in the first place?”

Because we will never blessing-bag our way out of homelessness. Compassion will always matter, but compassion alone cannot become an excuse for accepting conditions that should never have become normal.

The question is whether we are willing to treat the man lying in the road, the mother fleeing an unsafe home, and the child moving from motel to motel as our neighbors, and whether we love them enough not only to stop, but to help build a Jericho Road where fewer people are left lying beside it.