Live Now Live Later

Fall of 1993 my mom tells me we are moving back to Atlanta, Ga…

This was shocking News…

I was one month into attending a new school Eden Gardens Elementary as a 5th grader.

We had been staying with my grandparents for my 3rd and 4th grade year.

My mom was in a rough situation financially as a single mother having had 3 children ages 8 (me), 2(my sister), and a 1 month old son (my little brother).

At this particular time being 8, I didn’t understand my mother’s financial situation and how difficult it was for her. 

My mom was not receiving any financial support from any of the fathers…

My mom had a way of masking our poverty to where I believed we were an average family.

With that being said…

Spending 2 years with my grandparents was definitely an upgrade though. 

For one, we had CABLE! 😂

My grandmother cooked almost everyday and she cooked big meals.

I had everything I could dream of as a kid thanks in large part to my now deceased grandfather.

A basketball court, bicycle, a go-kart, my own room and a HUGE yard to do whatever I wanted.

I’m sure it may fall well below 2025 kids standards with no iPads and high tech video games, but for me it was the closest place to Heaven.

But in the fall of 1993, Heaven was on the verge of turning into… Hell.

My mom tells me we are moving back to Atlanta after having left just a few years prior.

My mom was dating a man whom I thought she was going to marry but after receiving that news I quickly realized she wasn’t as fond of him as I thought.

The night of our departure, the realization set in that this was really happening, we were about to leave Shreveport, but more than anything leave my GRANDPARENTS…

Extreme sadness set in that night. 

Reflecting back, I’m not sure how I held back the tears…

I wanted to cry. I was extremely emotional but didn’t know how to communicate my feelings with anyone…

One thing that helped me was that my grandparents were going to accompany us to Atlanta as they would drive their own car and we would trail them.

My mom’s guy friend was sad as well. So sad that he trailed our car all the way to the Louisiana state line.

I remember looking back periodically to see his headlights..

I remember having this glimpse of hope that maybe my mom would turn the car around as long as he followed us, but that never happened.

She was driven and determined to start a new life in the Black Mecca..

Where African Americans were and still are known to thrive in more than any other Major American City.

But at 10 years old I didn’t care about promising economic opportunities…

All I cared about were my grandparents…

Looking back I know they cared and were concerned about us too. I know this was difficult for them as much as it was for me.. 

After the long journey we finally arrived to Atlanta.

There was a lot of uncertainty for me as a kid. My mom had not gone into great details regarding the move.

All she told me was were moving…

Upon arrival, I realized the plan was not fully fleshed out..

On the contrary…

It was actually nothing but a skeleton…

I remembered us pulling up to a Motel 6..

My mom got out the car and went inside with my grandparents.

They were inside for what seemed like a good while and when my mom re-entered the car she said we were going to look for another place.

I quickly realized we had left Shreveport. A symbol of stability for me at that time to now looking for a temporary place of instability…

Sitting here right now reflecting on this moment of my thoughts as a child then, I have to breathe and hold back the tears…

I wasn’t much of a praying kid back then by any means but I was hoping with all of my heart that my grandparents wouldn’t leave me and would take me back with them…

I was denied that hope…

We found a hotel and within 24 hours my grandparents were on there way back to Shreveport…

Up to that point, outside of receiving the news just 3 years prior in 1990 that my father was killed in a plane crash, this had become the worst day of my life.

I didn’t hate my mother but I couldn’t make any sense of why we would move to what seemed like a hopeless situation such as this..

She never explained anything to me..

Maybe due to feeling that as a 10 year old I couldn’t comprehend her rationale or maybe she was her battling her own mental challenges and/or stress..

We would go on to bounce around from hotel to hotel for a while…

I still remember one particular day leaving one hotel to go to school and after school checking into a new hotel…

That was tough for me…

We lived like this for somewhere around 2 months… I don’t remember exactly…

Looking back, I was a pretty emotionally strong kid..

I’m not sure how I kept it together on the surface…

No one knew I was homeless….

Not a student nor the teachers…

I got bullied a lot and made fun of as a kid that school year, but it wasn’t for that…

At some point, my mom reached out to my younger brother’s dad Mark and we went to stay with him.

He lived in a very nice 2 story house not too far from my school Redan Elementary where I attended 5th grade..

Extremely nice and tranquil neighborhood…

I really liked it there…

But like other good things that I had got accustomed to at various points in my life , this too would end…

We moved out and moved into a woman’s home who I didn’t know.

She also had a 2 story home, but we were relegated to stay in a single room upstairs together…

I remember our initial walkthrough of her showing us the common areas.

I never felt welcomed in that place. It was in large part due to the owner of that house.

There was one day I remember vividly having gotten some type of stomach virus and woke up next to my mom and siblings vomiting out of control. 

I was puking all over the carpet..

I remember my mom rushing me to the bathroom and my head just dipped over the bowl for the longest.

I remember vomiting up everything within me and being in extreme pain.

I had never experienced anything like that in my life.

I remember my mom holding me and rocking me to sleep…

on the floor….

I would recover after a few days of missing school and life continued on…

Until one day, our life would change forever….

My mom told me that we were moving…

But this time, not to someone else’s house, not another hotel and not back to my brother’s dad house…

But this time….

To an empty house…

Our NEW HOME…

It was around April of 1994…

I remember pulling up to a beautiful brown wooden home on a street with a cul-de-sac at the end…

I thought I was dreaming…

I remember going through the home…

I thought my mom had secretly won the lottery…

We all had our own rooms with 2 separate living rooms…

It was arguably the greatest house ever built besides the White House…

At least in my eyes…☺️

As we were moving things in the home…

I saw some kids who appeared to be around my age on the other side of the street about 2 houses down playing basketball…

Which was my favorite sport by far…

I had not played basketball with other kids on a court since the days of living with my grandparents…

Those kids saw me and my mom moving our belongings inside…

One came over and asked if we needed some help…

About an hour later…

The others came over and asked if I wanted to come play with them…

In that moment, one of my favorite movies of all time still to this day, had just been released “The Sandlot”, came to mind…

Just like Scotty, I was the new kid on the block and being welcomed to the South Woodbridge Trail Neighborhood boys club…

It wasn’t like the He-man woman haters from the Little Rascals but we were definitely a family tight group..

For the first time in my life I finally found myself with a group of kids who accepted me with all of my quirkiness..

Looking back they were just as quirky.. some a little more than I 😂

Here I am, Late spring of 1994…

New friends, new home with my own room and most of all… New Hope..

The purpose of this blog is not principally to give you a snippet of a period of my childhood rather to expose a real issue within many American churches…

Christian Homelessness…

We went to church frequently on Sundays during my 5th grade year…

I never recall anyone reaching out to offer any assistance to my family…

Now I understand my mom may have played a part in that by not being vocal about her situation with the church..

My mom was a proud black woman who was raised in a middle class EXTREMELY conservative christian family…

She would never allow herself to resort to such means… She would rather sacrifice, pray and find a way to provide…

And she did…

But I know many families specifically single mothers who are experiencing similar situations….

According the National Christian Foundation, approximately 3.5 million people experience homelessness in the U.S. each year, and a significant portion identify as Christian. 

Millions more Christians live in financial hardship, though exact numbers vary by source…

And its not because all of these people are strung out on drugs, blowing their money away or lazy… 

My mom worked hard with her own hands making clothes she designed and going to flea markets and festivals every weekend to sell what she could with us alongside her…

Those, like my mother, who are christians believers should be able to seek the church they faithfully attend for food and housing assistance and the church should be ever ready to help…

NO matter the size of the congregation…

Jesus said in his sermon on the mount in Matthew 5, that God’s children “Are the LIGHT of the world. A city set on a hill that can’t be hidden”.

We see this exemplified in the primitive stage of the early church…

Early on we see the great emphasis being put on the brothers and sisters WITHIN THE CHURCH who had physical needs in Acts 2 & 4…

Nobody came and left Hungry…

No one came and left Homeless…

They were a family…

It wasn’t SOCIALISM… It was CHRISTIANITY…

Fast forward 2,000 years later, for most we don’t even think to check with the members of our churches to see if their are pressing physical needs…

Many of us leave Sunday services with a Laodicean type of mindset….

As Jesus said in Revelation 3:17, “You say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked”…

Perhaps you are offended by this…

Jesus was talking to “Christian” believers…

People who claim to be on their way like Abraham to a “city whose builder and maker is God”…

Ask yourself this question…

When was the last time you personally searched out to find someone you could assist with a material necesity in your local church???

I know you see people who are visibly in need…

The church was not called to be a socio economic reform organization for the world…

Rather we were called told take care of our own and by showing love to one another this would make us a light to the world…

And this was the case…

For the first few centuries….

And then slowly we began to lose our way as the universal church….

It’s time we go back to the blueprint of the Apostles…

Paul said to the church in Rome in chapter 12:13, “When God’s people are in need, be ready to help them. Always be eager to practice hospitality”..

James would tell the church in chapter 1:27 of his letter “Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you”…

Peter said in his first letter chapter 4:9 “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling”…

When Agabus stood before the disciples in Antioch in Acts 11 and prophesied that there would be a great famine across the Roman Empire and that the Jewish believers in Jerusalem would be the most affected…

They did no direct those believers to seek out a local food pantry or seek government assistance from the Roman governor over that province …

On the contrary…

The decision was made to begin collecting an OFFERING OF RELIEF mostly collected by the gentile churches to be sent to them. Paul and Barnabas would take the lead in this ministry need.

Paul would encourage and exhort the believers in CORINTH in his 2 letter (Chapters 8 & 9) to join in on this matter….

According to him, the Macedonian believers were more than willing to assist… even though they were poor themselves…

This was CHRISTIANITY….

This is what Jesus had in mind then and still does today…

Many of our churches go empty most of the week…

You telling me families especially single mothers and children who are faithful in attendance and service with suddenly no where to go or whom may have been laid off, we can’t allow them to at least utilize one of the rooms in the building to sleep on a cot until a permanent place can be found for them…

We should not be open to only doing things of this manner when there is a devastating NATURAL DISASTER.

While the church can’t solve all of the issues of this fallen world…

We can resolve the issues within the body of christ…

We should not have to wait to get to Heaven for that…