Part 2 of 3: November is National Homelessness Awareness month. To honor our unhoused neighbors during this month we will be featuring a three-part series on homelessness by DJ Johnsen.   

Alright, so maybe it’s hyperbolic to say one man – and only one man – changed my life.  But certainly Bear (as we called him) was one of a few “pillar people” I met in those fragile, formative years of life that come right after you’re done with college, strewn into the world, and doing your best to make sense of what your place in it might be.  

Here’s how I met Bear. I was living in a crowded downtown apartment with a few buddies at the time. Some of them were giving one night out of their week to mentor a group of teenagers that didn’t have a lot of parental support at home. They’d come back with stories of funny and tragic things these kids shared, and the rest of us got to look in on their lives and see the humble but real difference they were making each week. The rest of us wanted something similar. 

Hardly a day goes by in California where you don’t pass by an unhoused person sleeping or soliciting on the sidewalk, at least if you live anywhere near a town center. It didn’t take us long, then, to think of a way we could try to serve people who didn’t have it as good as us. We started going to the local rescue mission which, in our town, acts as a rehabilitation program for about forty men at a time, and serves breakfast and dinner every single day of the year to about 120 people coming in off the street. We figured we’d just go start volunteering to plate dinners and see what would happen from there.  

My friend Brandon or I would then get up and feign having any semblance of an idea as to what we were doing when it came to preaching.

Possibly because he saw potential in us (but probably because he was desperate) the homeless services director approached my friends and me after a few weeks and asked if we’d be willing to put on the chapel service on the days we served dinner. We hesitated. We made some excuses. And then we obliged. My buddy, Johny, would bring his guitar and sing a couple songs, pretty much unaccompanied (poor guy), and my friend Brandon or I would then get up and feign having any semblance of an idea as to what we were doing when it came to preaching. But it was fun. And people liked it.  

I’d stand up there at the podium with my Bible, looking out over faces etched with stories, a couple smiling, a few, inevitably, sleeping, and I’d always see a man in the back of the room, heavy-set with drooping, tanned cheeks, listening intently from his electric wheelchair. This same man would set up the sound equipment for us before we came and take it away after we left. I’d never talked to him, though, nor did he give off any sort of vibe of wanting to be talked to.  

“Don’t talk to me,” the big man snapped. “I’m not interested in you or in your religion. I’m here to do my part and then I leave.” And that was my first ever interaction with Bear.

So it was perhaps against my better judgment that I gave it a shot one day. We’d just finished up the service and he was rolling by, starting to unplug and coil up some wires.  

“Hey,” I began, in the softest tone I have, “I always see you helping out around here. And I just wanted to say thank you. What’s your name?”  

“Don’t talk to me,” the big man snapped. “I’m not interested in you or in your religion. I’m here to do my part and then I leave.”  

And that was my first ever interaction with Bear.  

I learned his name was Bear later on because Kay, another friend who regularly joined me at the mission, had shared a brief conversation with him the week before. She wisely advised that we just keep our distance for now, and after my disastrous attempt to introduce myself, that plan came as some relief. That was in October.  

November came around, and each of us left for our hometowns to spend Thanksgiving with our families. We were back at the mission the week after. When we’d wrapped up the chapel service, Bear piloted his way towards the sound equipment as usual, but his trajectory changed. He was making his way towards us! 

There on the hospital bed, brought back from the flat-line, God had told Bear that a new beginning was coming, and that he needed to be open to it.

To our shock, he asked for a moment to speak with us. He proceeded to share that over the week we’d been away, he’d fallen life-threateningly ill and was rushed to the hospital. For lack of knowing how else to describe what had happened to him, he told us he had met God. We learned that evening that Bear, several years prior, had lost his wife and his two kids in a car accident. He was the only surviving member of the family. There on the hospital bed, brought back from the flat-line, God had told Bear that a new beginning was coming, and that he needed to be open to it. He wasn’t sure, he said, but he wondered if we – our group of four friends – were part of that new beginning.  

It really was a new beginning with Bear. He started sitting in the front row of the chapel services. He slept, most nights, in a park just down the street from our apartment and we’d bring him new foam pads and sleeping bags when he needed them. More than anything else in the world, he loved cooking for people. Being so fresh out of school, we still had lots of friends living in town and summer was barbecue season. Bear would roll up parallel to the grill, raise his hydraulic chair to the desired level, and cook for thirty, fifty, seventy people at a time.  

Involving Bear in our lives and being involved in his was gratifying, inconvenient, frustrating, and sweet. The illness that broke his heart open to us was cancer, and that cancer eventually took his life. When he was dying, we all had a chance to visit him. He was sure, then, that God was talking about us that day on the hospital bed a couple of years earlier. God had given him a new family.  

I think a lot of us eventually give up on dreams of changing the world because it feels too big. With Bear I learned that we get a chance to change the world right where we are in small ways, often for just one or two people.

I guess I say Bear changed my life because I had previously thought changing the world looked like discovering the vaccine for polio or founding a clean water nonprofit. Those are noble things, but they feel a bit too aspirational for most of us, and I think a lot of us eventually give up on dreams of changing the world because it feels too big. With Bear I learned that we get a chance to change the world right where we are in small ways, often for just one or two people.  

Loving our unhoused neighbor connects us to something we already know to be true: we were meant to live in a way that makes life better for others.

And I learned that doing so does something very important inside of us. It cracks open our hearts too. 

Loving our unhoused neighbor connects us to something we already know to be true: we were meant to live in a way that makes life better for others. It can be scary and disappointing and time-consuming. But also, it can connect our gifts and our resources to some of the people who could use them most.