Homeless Shelter

Homeless Shelter

It happened again the other day: a good-intentioned acquaintance informed me, "Well, Ryan, you have to realize that you really have lived a sheltered life." This time, I was being compared to a workmate whose wrinkles and smoker's cough delineated a hard life. As the oldest of six children born to a Baptist preacher, you'd think I'd be used to people condescending to help me broaden my horizons. After all, I attended high school in my bedroom and college on a campus where guys couldn't touch girls. I'd better be a glutton for punishment if I try to consider myself part of the real world—or at least to relate to those in it.

Sheltered. A word that can connote several images. You can think of a puppy in a red and white doghouse on a stormy night. You can think of a political refugee or key trial witness surrounded by suited protection. Or you can—as so many like my workmate—think of someone with narrow vision and inexperience in the real world.

I assume that the real world in America (as compared to my Christian worldview) would include exposure to some or all of the general standard vices, trials, and vistas. Only my workmate would know the list by which she judges, and you probably have your own.

It's true: I've never smoked anything in my short life—not even sausage. I don't know what pot smells like. I do know what it is to lose a grandfather because he lost two lungs and that my parents considered divorce over the issue early in their marriage. I've come under the smoke from two grandmothers, multiple aunts, and countless rude people at the doors of non-smoking buildings. I've felt the rasp against my throat and wondered how anyone could let that fill them. But, no, I've been sheltered like President Clinton from inhaling a narcotic of my own.

I admit: I can't remember any alcoholic beverages ever crossing my lips. Robitussen: yes. Hairspray: no. I'm afraid I got more buzz off the codine than anything. Heck, Coca Cola's biting enough for me. But that doesn't mean I haven't smelt the breath of a homeless man as it wet my neck on a Baltimore street or that I've never had a friend hit head-on by a dastard drunk. My grandma has owned a bar twice—the same one where my pastor-dad had to visit in order to see her on a trip home. I was left outside. I guess that's two strikes on me now.

If you must know, I was exposed to sex before marriage. I had perverts hold pornography to the skin of my face, waiting for me to open my eyes. I didn't. I've had workmates offer to get the establishment's whore drunk for me, if I'd take her upstairs and tell them how it went. (They were part of the crew that offered on multiple paydays to sponsor my first Friday night at Redeye's Dock Bar.) I've been in truck stop bathrooms and read countless reasons why Bridget is worth calling. I didn't have a quarter to call her or three for the glow-in-the-dark condoms. And I didn't have sex with anyone but my wife and that only after our wedding. I'm a statistical anomaly—outside the loop like Brittney Spears.

Comparatively, I had a childhood of luxury. Any number of Somalians would've raided the homeless shelter where I used to pick out my play clothes. Hindu people would have emptied the Kmart and Sam's Club dumpsters where I gleaned half the furnishings in my apartment—a scavenger resource taught me by my dad. Farmers and children of farmers in my current corn belt state tell me I'm lucky to have started working as late as eleven and that the two-job, sixty-five hour weeks in high school were cake. When I couldn't afford to dry my laundry in college, despite work shifts that allowed only four or five hours of sleep a night, I had a top bunk to hang my wet whites. And I had college: a privilege many ghetto dwellers would covet.

I've been surrounded by guys chanting for me to try the fit of f— on my tongue. The same guys walked beside me to let me in on their homosexual and bestiality temptations. They were joking, I hope. Thankfully, it was a joke when women at my shoe store job told me they'd like to see me take off my clothes—both times. But since I was the hearer and not the speaker, I think it doesn't count toward reality.

So, maybe I have been sheltered from the harshness of life. I'm figuring this out as I write, and the truth hurts. I don't know whether to feel sorry for myself or sorry for the world I haven't experienced.

I mean, so many well-rounded people know what it's like to cough without remedy, to finish a party with a toilet under their chin or without memories of how they got in the bed they did. They know they have the audacity to use the name of the God of the universe like the or and. They know how seriously a doctor can explain their venereal disease or pending liver failure. They know so much that I will never understand.

Despite this, sometimes I wish that they could be sheltered, too—retroactively. Or at least in a way different than they are now. Right now, so many people my age are sheltered from guiltless sex with the guaranteed-best partner they will ever have. Some are on the outside of the bubble, looking in at my family of eight still together. A few are protected from seeing the world on the other side of iron bars; fewer still are restricted from breathing without a machine by tubes in their noses. I wish they knew how to laugh and feel it in their heart—a heart shutting out the love and hope found only from the God of my faith.

My faith has sheltered me as long as I have let it. I've sworn before. I've laughed at things that Christ wouldn't. I've lied. I've done a lot of things I wouldn't tell my kids or my parents. But I've come back to Christ time and again, because he told me to be in the world and not of it. Christ could ask that of me because he asked that of himself. He knew what alcohol and harlots smelled like; he knew temptations that we never will. Yet he knew what it was to commune with heaven and what it would someday mean to us. If it weren't for him coming with the promise of a new someday home (though I'd still have a healthier lifestyle by living the way I do), I'd be haunted every day by the futility of life. And maybe I'd be apt to try the homeless shelter of this world's vanity fair.