It's Lon, a health care leader in the Northeast.
We were on a national leadership team and it's been four years since I've seen or talked to him.
People normally only communicate when they want something.
Reading his email fills me with an exhaustion that still hasn't quite gone away though it's been five years since I worked directly with homeless people.
Thirty years is a long time.
In those decades I've seen everything people can do to each other ... the Glorious and the Gut Wrenching.
The funny thing is he should be asking them and not me.
Whatever success we achieved is because my primary job was to listen.
"Hey Rev," a sick man wrapped in bandages asks as we sit in the courtyard of the homeless shelter, "can we have our own hospital?"
"Why?" you just got back from the hospital and you seem to be doing alright.
"They treat us like shit there," he fires. "I've got prescriptions but no way of filling them."
"I see what you mean."
It's true ... Hospitals treat you like shit if you can't pay.
So we built a hospital for people perfectly capable of understanding what they need to not be homeless.
Even the mentally ill know they need treatment and medication but it's damn near impossible in a country that blames the individual for whatever it is that's wrong.
"Damn you Lon," I mutter at my Laptop.
It's a rain kissed summer morning, a choir of birds sing as the sun blazes through the Palm Tree with the oyster face, coconut bra and grass skirt.
"He wants it for free too," I say out loud startling Squirrels playing in the trees.
Few understand the costs.
Everything costs!
Some are willing to pay the price though most are not.
I gave them my all ... and they took it.
At precisely the right time Sarah wakes and I delight in giving her morning kisses so Lon is saved for later.
I'm too anal to not write him back but at the moment other things are just more important.
__________________
The photograph is of our dear friend Dr. Jim Withers of Pittsburgh but really of the world who takes the Hospital to the Homeless because he understands they're incapable of getting their by themselves.
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