The World Is A Ghetto

With apologies to WAR - the band

Though I’m hoping that I never have to learn to do this, I find it amazing! Ignore the newsreaders except to note how much they are worried about city revenue and property taxes, like the shills they are.

This man is free and has skills – or developed the skills – to make his situation better and he has done so. Mostly, I’m impressed by his orderliness. One of the most disgusting things about homeless camps: the mountains of trash that usually go with them.  

Many know that I was homeless for a brief period a while back. You can read a little about it here. 

Since that time, I’ve been thinking about the homeless, praying for them as a group, and praying for individuals that I run across during my daily LA sojourns. Additionally, I’ve been observing how the California Political Left pretends to try to solve homelessness while actively encouraging it. But, in the back of my mind – in my spirit – there's a question about what God is showing us, homeless and not homeless alike, by allowing homelessness to proliferate. Side thought: it reminds me of the Feast of the Tabernacles. (Sometimes God shows rather than tells.)

I’ve lived in my present apartment for seven years. It’s not far from one of the houses in which I grew up and I pass by both my junior high school (now a middle school) and my high school almost daily. I like the area’s integrated make-up: mostly Hispanic and Korean, along with significant portions of black and white. Up until roughly two years ago, the most dangerous thing about my street was that drivers liked to speed.

Then, when LA began to release prisoners from the jails, there were two shootings next door within a short span of time. “Coincidentally,” they happened on separate Sunday mornings as I was preparing to go to church. There was a fatality from the first shooting, but, with the second one, no one was hit as far as I know. 

I planned to move, but the timing was poor: late 2019.

Much later, one of my neighbors who lives in the targeted apartment building told me that one of the former tenants had turned the apartment into a “trap house.” Being old, I had to ask what that was: a drug house. 

Since that person was evicted, there have been no more shootings nearby. But this is LA and there have been three occasions of shotgun blasts in roughly the last two years. All of those happened in the early morning. (I usually wake up no later than 3AM.) 

When I mentioned all this to an acquaintance – a Christian – that person floored me with this: “A woman of God shouldn’t live in a ghetto.” 

That person seeded some real doubt about my relationship with God. We don’t talk with each other anymore. 

I offer the contrary: it is in reduced circumstances and in danger where God is highly likely to show up and abide. And it has occurred to me, very often, that, ripe ground for the Holy Spirit exists among the homeless. I thought of that again when I watched this video. 

He is our only Hope and that has always been so and always provides a home for those who ask it of Him and act to obtain that home.

And the ghetto is anywhere in which we keep Him out.

For those of you who are too young to get the reference: