The Cecil County Men’s Shelter has come into being as an effort to give practical expression to the native generosity of this community. Its reason for being is to enable that generosity, not to burden it.
Each of us has times when we are afraid to care. To care about just one more thing feels like it will break us or exhaust us. We have children who grow so fast and require so much of us that they could be our full©time job. We have family members who are ill and aging and do not have the company or the support or the care they need. We have jobs which do not pay us enough to live or which leave us with little energy or attention for anything else at the end of the day. Perhaps we have no job at all. Maybe we belong to more organizations than we can do justice to and this makes us feel bad about ourselves. Even when we can meet our basic needs and those of our family, there dozens of messages and signs each day which point to areas of uncertainty, places where we are still potentially at risk.
We are afraid to care anymore than we already do. We resist caring about one more thing. There does not seem to be any room in our hearts even for just this one last thing. If we let it in our hearts will break. This is how it feels.
But we do care about it. We have cared all along. The fact that we try to resist the caring proves that we do.
We even care about the homeless and especially about homeless men. They do not look lovable. They do not seem approachable. They look lonely and out of reach. What a problem they seem to be. Even ”one· man, hitch-hiking along Route 40 or sleeping behind a dumpster or wandering through town, obviously out of place, can seem like an insurmountable problem. Our reaction is alarm. There seems to be more need there than we can ever hope to meet. We would like to help, but our discouragement is too heavy. We decide that we cannot make any difference, and that this is a place where we cannot hope to care. What might happen to us going down the road of putting this concern into action! We might be overwhelmed.
Our fear of caring may turn to anger. We may get angry that we are being confronted with this problem. We may get angry with the person whose plight we are forced to witness. We are not bad and do not want to feel bad if we pass this person by. Many different things may come into our minds about why this person does not “deserve” to be cared about by us.
Our own need to survive and to keep our lives intact urges us to quell our natural, compassionate response. Yet it is only because our first response is compassionate that we become alarmed and angry. Though fear stops them in mid-course, the arms of our heart did reach out.
Encountering men on the street, our response is no different, despite what we have been taught about men standing tall, standing on their own, feeling less pain, needing less help, wanting to be alone. We have brothers, fathers, sons, friends, partners. We have seen their pain; and, though we may not know what to do about it, we would like to. One thing we know from experience: no one stands alone.
Helping does not need to be done alone either. It consists mostly of facilitating the use of that fund of good will upon which we ”all· draw many times in our life together. There are more than adequate resources at hand to harbor, nurture, and respect the men of this community who require temporary care. There are countless concrete ways in which this can be done. We have only to organize this goodness to best effect.
The rural, poor, unemployed, transient, veteran can have a place to bide and to grow. It can be done without being another burden. It will meet a critical need. It will be a place where we can hope to care.
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