Urban Outreach

Urban Outreach consites of 4 teams, 3 in which go out into the Los Angeles area and help out in a soup kitchen or walk the streets and just talk and listen to people. A few weeks ago my group headed out the Santa Monica to spend some time with the homeless, listening to their stories, and just showing them some love. Here is how my night played out....

I was paired up with Ben, who is from France and speaks pretty good English, anyways we all set off in our differnt directions, Ben and I heading down towards the Beach and Pier thinking that we would go talk to some people off the main street (the promenode). As we were walking we were just talking about what we thought was going to happen that night. At one point I had said that it will be okay if we only end up talking to one person, however we both agreed that we wanted to talk to more then one. So we walked down to the beach area and noticed that all of the homeless who were there were sleeping and thought better then to wake them up to say hi. So we walked back up to the main street, then continued a block futher. We saw a lady sitting on a bench who was homeless, with her cart full of treasures. We walked up to her and I said Hello and she just looked at us, "Hi" and that was it. So we left her to do what ever she was doing and walked back across the street to the next intersection. At which point neither Ben nor I knew which way we should go, left, right, or straight. So we asked God to give us some direction, at which point Ben said that we should go talk to the man playing the guitar across the street, I was quite pleased with that because I felt that we were to go straight across as well.

We crossed the street and appoched the man, who was sitting infront of a "Chocolate Cafe", strumming on his guitar, wearing a ball cap, yellow REI wind jacket with a darker fleece over top. I started by saying hello, and he looked up at Ben and I with a great smile, and replyed with a friendly hello back. From there it was an easy converstaion. We listened as "Bo" told us about his life, being in the military travelling to Europe, having a degree in computer sciences and haveing everything to just then loose it all for the nothing world of drugs and alcohal. Talking about his music, the hopes of having a band come together and having his on label some day. We asked Bo to play a little for us and with great happiness he did.The first song that he sang was "Jukebox Hero". Which I had never heard until that morning when my mom had sent me an email with a You Tube video clip of that song. I thought that was a little crazy! He continuted sharing his own music and some covers with us. We talked for just over an hour, its was great to just hang out, I felt so blessed to hang out with him. He had some differnt ideas on the bible and God, but who doesn't?!

I just had a great night, and it was great to have a positive experience because you only hear about the negitive.