Since 2007, the number of homeless individuals and families has hovered between 580,000 to 650,000. That is a staggering number. Have you ever wondered where that figure comes from? Well, every year in January, The U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development partners with agencies and organizations, both government and private, to do an actual head count. The sheltered and unsheltered are counted on one night to avoid duplication. As you can imagine, the sheltered are pretty easy to count, but the unsheltered homeless are a different story. Many of them are hidden in the shadows of wooded areas, vacant buildings and other such places and consequently, they don’t get counted.
Many other factors affect the accuracy of the count that we won’t go into here today, but I mention this because many experts in the field suspect that the homeless population is much larger. The Department of Education estimates that there are over 1.3 million homeless children in America. One reason for that discrepancy is because of different definitions for homelessness used by different agencies. Over the past 10 years, here in North Texas, our count has turned up between 250 – 300 homeless neighbors.
I know that is a lot of data, but here is my point. Whether it is one or one million, it is too many. At Wichita Falls Faith Mission, we have found that many of our homeless neighbors can be helped. Yes, we face an uphill battle every day with addiction and untreated mental illness running rampant in our community, but we believe there is hope. The troubling thing is that so many of them are invisible, sometimes in plain sight.
That is why we are committed to going where they are and making our services available to them. We go into the camps and hide-outs (carefully of course) and offer them many of the same services they would get if they came into our shelters. They don’t all respond positively, but the ones who do, we can help.
Over the next few sessions of Every Story Matters, I want to share some of those stories. I will of course change the names but leave the details so you can see that lives are being changed right here in our area and God is still performing miracles.
You will see that when we serve God by serving people, it may not change the world, but it just might change someone’s world.
I’m Steve Sparks, CEO at Wichita Falls Faith Mission reminding you that Every Story Matters.
