Still Homeless...

Two weeks ago, I celebrated my third anniversary working at Liberty University.

In May, I celebrated –if you want to call it that- three years of living indoors, after spending most of the previous six years, homeless. I should be thankful, and I am, but the bloom is starting to wear off the rose.

When you lose your home, something inside you dies. There is a vault full of memories that seems ever-more empty as time rolls on. It has unfilled shelves where moments were supposed to be, but aren’t. You remember the Christmases, and the summer evenings and the clear, cold winter nights when you sat outside and looked at the Milky Way and you know there should have been more. You come home to a house that isn’t yours, and holds no memories for you, and you simply live there. But it’s not home. Not really.

The last few weeks this has hit me hard, and I’ve caught myself shedding tears at odd moments during the day. The sadness of losing the home I’d worked for and had grown to love, coupled with the reality that given my situation now, it’s unlikely I’ll ever own a home again…at times has been too much.

I was thinking about the folks in Houston. So far, almost 200,000 people have lost their homes. That’s an enormous number. That’s the size of a lot of entire cities in the U.S.

I feel so much sadness for them. What if you simply can’t rebuild? Your home is in your heart, but it needs a physical embodiment, and our houses become that. I know mine was. My house represented the struggles I’d had and the victories I’d won up to that point. I worked hard to get that house. I survived a divorce that crushed me, the soul-crushing time-restriction of child visitation. I ached with loneliness when my daughter wasn’t with me, but I soldiered on. That house, was our place. Her's and mine. It was full of peace and calm, and stood in stark contrast to her mother’s house, with its tension and violence. She wrote the foreword to my latest book and she described it as her safe-haven. And it’s gone.

But it’s not gone from our hearts and that hurts. It’s a picture on my wall –invisible to anyone else- that silently compares itself to this cramped townhouse we now live in. It’s a vivid scene in my mind as I drive down the twisting country lane I lived on and see my beautiful little yellow rancher as I round the curve. Only now I must drive on past, because it’s not my address anymore.

More and more it feels like it was my last chance at home ownership. It was so perfect for me…that house of mine. It was just right. Nothing about my current address is just right. Nothing. I sleep here, I cook here, I shower here. Repeat daily. I own one couch. We have a crooked little kitchen table that is so warped and sloping your plate will slide off if you’re not careful. We have one chair for the table. We can’t even eat dinner together, my daughter and I. We hardly care because we both feel the same way about this place. It’s just a rental. It’s not home. All our memories lie in a 2000 square-foot yellow ranch house on five acres in some other part of the world. We just live here. But we don’t live here.

It’s not that I’m not thankful for my job and for not being homeless anymore and especially for having my daughter with me where she’s safe. I am. But it’s been three years now. The reality of what I went through has sunk in entirely and the truth about where I am and where I am likely going, has also shown its face. I am lost. Lost, and feeling like this will be my lot in life for the rest of my days. 

A tenant. 

Physically living here, but emotionally living hundreds of miles away. 

I’m stuck. 

I haven’t succumbed to the idea yet…not entirely. I fear that when I do, I’ll be completely without hope from that point on. Living without hope is the worst form of death. Brennan Manning wrote in “The Ragamuffin Gospel” that there are three ways to commit suicide: Take your own life, let yourself die, or live without hope. The last choice is the most dubious, because it takes so long. You’re already dead and you don’t know it. Or you do, and you feel it constricting you and swallowing you a little more each day. I feel that way. I feel –for the first time in my life- that it’s pointless to dream now. That it’s past the point of planning for something better. That this is all there is, and all there will be, and it’s time to get on with the sad tedium of trudging through each day for the rest of my life.

The only hope I cling to is that my daughter will have a far better life than she would have had otherwise, had we stayed as we were. That, and the hope that maybe God is still working in this, and this isn’t the final chapter for me yet. He owes me nothing. I don’t have any expectations of Him depositing a house on my lap, or some mystery millions in my bank account.

I have to pretend. I have to smile and make-believe that this is okay with me. I have to deny the ache in my soul, that cries out for a real home and some real friendships and some real hope and a job that elicits pride and a sense of accomplishment. There is a line in Thomas Wolfe’s classic “You Can’t Go Home Again” and I think of it often. It fits me now and the mere fact that I am living this quotation breaks my heart all over again. But I must live this, or the pain and loss will overwhelm me. It is this:

“Man was born to live, to suffer and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the end. But we must, dear Fox, deny it, all along the way.”

There are those who’ve had it worse than me. I know this. But comparing pain and heartache is a fool’s errand. I’ve had all my heart can take. Maybe your heart could have taken more. Then too, maybe I would have smiled and laughed at your tragedies. It’s impossible to measure and quantify.

Three years have come and gone since I woke up from that nightmare. But I woke to find that some of that dream is reality, and I’ll have to deal with it for the rest of my days.

In some ways, I am still very much a homeless man. In need of a home. A haven. My own little castle to defend. Until then, the warrior in my soul… he who would defend that castle and it’s residents, remains at large. Wandering. Scanning the horizon for the shadowy outline of the place he calls home. Hoping to see it soon. Fearing that he won’t.

When You're Homeless...free chapter

This is an "Interlude" chapter from my book, explaining how homelessness feels for a father...

When you’re homeless, you feel like you’re on the outside looking in. Like there is an invisible wall between yourself and “normal” folks. It feels like it’s a slow-moving nightmare and you can’t tell which part is the dream and which is reality. You want to wake up, but you’re already awake.

It feels like you’re watching the normal folks with their normal life, a life that you used to have as well, and you start forgetting what all that felt like. What it was like to have a kitchen, and a stove, and a bed...and an address. You try to forget about your dogs and your cat and your garden. You overhear bits of conversations about mundane home ownership, and you wish you could be doing those things that had the normal people complaining. You wish you still had a lawn to cut. You wish you had a driveway to seal, or an electric bill to groan about. You’d give anything for a nosy neighbor.

When you are homeless, you don’t wake up on Monday mornings, have the Monday morning blues, and make jokes with your coworkers about how “It’s Monday again...” Because when you’re homeless, every day feels like Monday. Every day greets you with the blues. Every day finds you one day further removed from humanity. One more day since your last meaningful conversation. One more day since you had clean sheets and a warm bed. One more day has passed since you had a cup of coffee in your kitchen, in your mug, from your coffee maker.

When you’re homeless, you can’t run home for lunch, or grill out, or hang your laundry out to dry. You can’t take a warm shower at the end of a hard day’s work, because you don’t have a shower, and you can’t find any work.

When you’re homeless, you can’t stay indoors on a cold, rainy, November Saturday and get caught up on some reading, and have a nice fire in the fireplace and make some soup and watch the cold rain as it falls. When you’re homeless, you try to stay dry and warm and out of sight if you can.

When you’re homeless there are no pictures on your walls, because you have no walls. So, you carry them in your wallet, and in your heart. They come alive at night, these pictures. They haunt you. Pictures of your little girl and the rope swing you had in the oak tree out back, and how she laughed, and wanted you to push her for hours. Pictures of how your beloved dog Bonnie would come over to you on the sofa and lay her chin on your leg, and let out a soft little sigh and look at you plaintively until you scratched her head. Pictures of your daughter and the time you filled the Jacuzzi tub with Mr. Bubble powder, and she was lost in the suds and laughing up a storm and having the most fun you’d ever seen. Pictures of when it was that you had a life.

Other times, it’s like being on the inside looking out. You swear everyone knows. Everyone sees. You hide your bedroll in the trunk of your car but maybe they saw it when you were getting your school books. You circle the church where you hide your car at night to get a few hours of sleep. You circle it like a hawk, hunting for his prey, waiting until you don’t see any headlights coming in either direction and then you pull in before someone sees you. Your heart races, and pounds and you swear that this time, they saw your taillights and they’ve called the cops. You hurry up and back into the overgrowth until you are hidden from view. They can’t see you but you swear they can. You wait, being as quiet as a mouse, barely breathing. Ten minutes go by. Then twenty. Sitting still like this means the fatigue that has become part of your DNA, starts to catch up to you but you fight it. After enough time passes, you let out your breath and realize that nobody saw you. You’ve pulled it off one more time. You get changed into your sweatpants and sweatshirt and zipper into two sleeping bags and try not to let yourself admit how cold it really is. The cold has gotten into your bones by now and you can never quite feel warm. Your body is warm enough with all the layers, but you’re still breathing frigid air and you wake up shivering. You feel like every pair of eyes in the world is dialed in on you when you’re homeless. Do they know? Surely they know. Everyone knows. You walk with your head down, and your eyes lowered. Because even if nobody else around you knows, you know. And that’s bad enough. You stop looking in store-front windows because you can’t bear seeing your own reflection. You hide your shame when you see your daughter, because after all...you’re still her daddy.

Sometimes, you feel like a caged animal. Like the little people inside a snow-globe, never moving, never showing any reaction whenever some outside force shakes their world and stirs up the snow. Their smile painted on. Their faces plastic and emotionless. That is you now. Feeling less and less, because feeling anything at all only reminds you of who you used to be and who you are now.

When you’re homeless, you don’t tuck your kids in at night. You lay there in your sleeping bags and cry because you miss them. On the coldest nights, the tears freeze to your cheeks and they cut you like diamonds when you wipe them away. You remember your little girl’s bedtime prayers and you swear you can still hear her voice as she says them... “God bless Bonnie and Cooper and our cat Jackie. God bless Daddy...”

God bless Daddy.

God? God who? You question Him. Sometimes you curse at Him because it feels like He’s just left you here.

Sometimes you cry out to Him for mercy and beg Him for hope. You pray to Him. You pray to him for your daughter. “Please, God,” you beg, “Please give me a place to live again. My daughter needs me and I need her.” Then you think about her life and the pain she feels. “Please God,” you continue, “Please protect her like I would if I was there right now.” And the tears resume, and the sobs, and the memories, and the questions, and the doubts.

When you’re homeless, you no longer get your daughter once a week and every other weekend. You get McDonald’s for an hour every few days after school. You try hiding the truth from her, but she’s smart. She finds out, and then you feel even worse because you know her, and now she is worrying herself sick about you every night. When you’re homeless, you are still someone’s father, but you sure don’t feel very fatherly.

When you’re homeless, you think of the old days and the happy times and those memories are triggered by the strangest things. I was walking through the mall one hot summer afternoon, just trying to stay out of the heat. I walked past the “Build-a-Bear Workshop” store and I stopped outside and watched the little kids. There was a girl there who reminded me of my own daughter a few years before. She was finishing up her bear and doing the little routine where they tell the kids to jump up and down and turn around. I remembered all the trips we made together to this place. Back when I had a job and a home and she had a bedroom where she kept all these prized little stuffed friends. It felt like it was a million years ago. It felt like I was watching it all from some cloak of invisibility. The little girl clutched her new beloved friend as mine had done. I turned away in tears. I raced to the bathroom before the sobs embarrassed me in the mall.

When you’re homeless, every little thing reminds you that you used to have a home, and your daughter used to spend weekends with you, and you used to be someone.

When you’re homeless, you reach a point where you want to quit. In that moment, you’d better have a reason to keep fighting. You’d better have something or someone you love more than you love yourself. Believe me, when you want to give up, when you want to craw inside a bottle and die, or jump from a bridge, or just fall asleep in the dead of winter and let your body freeze...there had better be a face you see when you close your eyes that keeps you going. Because when you’re homeless, just you alone...

...isn’t nearly enough.

What now...

So now what?

Two weeks ago, I released my newest book; “Nowhere to lay my Head: The True Story of a Homeless Dad.”  I feel like I let out a giant breath. In a way, this book was a nine-year process. I spent six years living it, three years trying not to think about it much while I recovered from it, and six months reliving every painful moment as I wrote about it, formatted it, edited it, and finally published it.

There were times while I wrote about the painful situations I faced, that I cried harder in the remembrance than I did when it happened in the first place. Thinking about my daughter, and what she was enduring at the hand of her mother’s husband, was heart-rending. I’d forgotten that I’d been hired three times by companies that all eventually went out of business. I’d forgotten how it felt when my former pastor broke my heart by telling me I wasn’t handling my homelessness the way he thought I should have, and that I was betraying my faith by crying out in pain.

I’d forgotten how many nights it was cold beyond belief, and how I never quite got used to that. I’d forgotten how stifling hot it would get in the summers, when it would rain on those hot steamy nights and I couldn’t open the windows because the rain would get in, so I sweltered in my car. I’d forgotten how much trauma it caused to my daughter to have a homeless dad who wanted to help her, but couldn’t offer very much help.

I say I’d forgotten those things but I don’t think I did…I think I buried them. I denied their existence because it hurt too much, and I was too busy trying to survive it all. Then, when I finally found work and moved with my daughter, to Virginia and began the slow process of rebuilding; I just didn’t want to remember it for a while.

When it was finally time to write the book, it changed my behavior for a while. Each morning, as I rose at 4 a.m. to write before work and then each evening as I wrote before bed, I traveled back through shuttered rooms and behind locked doors in my heart. I had compartmentalized the entire six years and I only allowed myself to look at –and to feel- those parts that were “safe” to talk about.

I could feel myself turning darker as the months of writing passed. It was hard enough living through that for six years, now I was retracing every single, painful step and trying to recall, in exhausting detail, how it felt and how it affected me and what it did to my daughter. It overpowered me much of the time. My coworkers noticed. My daughter noticed. Eventually I noticed. Thankfully, the process ended right before everyone grew weary of me and friendships were damaged.

Everything about this book was hard. Everything. Even the title was a topic of debate and turmoil. I originally intended to call it: “A dad never quits” but a friend of mine reminded me that many dads do quit. A lot of dads would go through what I did for my family, but many would not, and the title seemed unfair to the families of the men who were quitters. I realized this and I explained to my friend that within the first few chapters, I defined what a real dad is, and that a real dad never quits, and if a man quits…he’s not a dad. But after we discussed it further, I realized she was right. Besides that, as I completed more and more of the book, I saw it morph from just a simple story of my homelessness, to an analogous tale of Christ’s homelessness. For a long time, I labored under the delusion that my faith was weak. That I had failed Jesus in my handling of this six-year walk through the desert of homelessness. I guess my former pastor’s harsh words had done more soul damage than I knew. I saw myself as something of a failure because I hadn’t smiled through my heartache and sung songs in my prison of homelessness, as Paul and Sylas did in jail. I thought I wasn’t much of a believer anymore because I hadn’t always handled my situation with an endless barrage of bible verses and modern worship songs.

I had cried. A lot. I had questioned God. I had tasted more failure in that six years than ever in my life and I hadn’t always liked the way it felt as it went down. I saw the damage done to my daughter and I was disillusioned by it all.

As I got deeper and deeper into the Faith aspect of the book, and as I wrote more and more about where my heart was in all this, I realized that I hadn’t done that badly after all. I didn’t smile sweetly while the whole world took a giant poo on me and then collapsed, but I didn’t quit either. I didn’t crawl inside a bottle, I didn’t turn to drugs, I didn’t rob a bank to survive.

I didn’t quit.

I didn’t stop trying. I didn’t stop believing. I didn’t get so exasperated that I just refused to take all the small, ignoble odd jobs I was working, in order to just put gas in my car.

I might not have had a faith that others wanted to emulate, but I hadn’t abandoned what faith I did have, either. It got stripped down to its core and burnished in the fires I was trapped in. But, by-God it was still standing.

Writing the book brought me face-to-face with the unsettled nature of my own soul. The “who am I and who does God want me to be?” questions that had already been nagging my heart long before I became a vagabond dad. Suddenly, “Nowhere to lay my Head” became the only possible title for this book. It made sense. It tied the ends together.

And so, two weeks ago this morning, I clicked a button and the baby was given life. So far I’ve given two interviews and people have responded positively. People are intrigued by the story. They are challenged and encouraged.

But now what?

What’s funny to me is that I still feel homeless. I have a home. Or at least a place to live. But I am a turbulent, brooding ocean inside. I have a job and a bed and a kitchen, something I did without for six years. In my heart, though, I am still walking those endless miles in Pinkerton Park in Franklin, TN…trying to find my way home.

More and more I feel that this story isn’t over yet. More and more I look to the horizon, wondering what is out there.

When I began this journey, my daughter was ten. Next week she’ll be nineteen.

I lost six very important years and I can never get them back. Those years were the most valuable thing I had and to be quite honest…I don’t feel that I’ve gotten a fair value in return for them. Not yet anyway.

Now what? What becomes of a man who turns 54 this fall and who’s heart still longs to dream, and battle, and accomplish, and conquer, but who has tasted far more defeat than he has victory, and whose hourglass has far more sand in the bottom than it does at the top?  Where is my home?

I’m restless again. Which means –in some ways- I’m homeless again. The title of my book comes from Luke 9:58: “Foxes have dens, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.” Jesus said that to a man who claimed he would follow Him anywhere he asked. Brennan Manning calls it “the loneliest verse in the bible.” It’s lonely because, in the original language, it reads this way: “The Son of man has no place to lay His head, and take His rest.” It wasn’t just about a bed and a place to sleep. It was about a home. Home base. A safe spot in the world. Your turf.

I don’t know where mine is anymore. I don’t know where I go from here. My compass spins erratically sometimes and I can’t seem to find True North.

What now? What do I do with a story like this? What do I get for six years of struggle?

I’m no hero…I just did something heroic.

The truth is that I still have a heart full of regret. I would give anything to go back and have those six years with my little girl again. Only this time, to still have my home and my career. I am not yet at a place where I say “Yes…it was for something better.”

I know God had a plan and there was a purpose, I just don’t see it yet.

I have a job, and a place to live. But my soul…is still homeless. When I was living in my car, I’d often look into the night sky and angrily ask “What do you want from me?”

I’m not angry anymore, but sometimes I still look into the night sky. But these days I ask “What now?”