'Homeless' and 'Hopeless' Only One Letter Apart

Hope is a casualty of homelessness.
The photograph to the right, under the word “Broken” is worth the 1,000-plus words it would take to describe what the downcast, ashamed, lost look that this young man expresses with his face and body language.
Yet, in the face of homelessness, all is not lost. Hope does not have to throw itself under a bus. Jesus Himself was homeless for a time, and in His experience is the implicit statement that He knows the ills and the hollowness and the pain of belonging nowhere and to no one, except His Father in Heaven.
I know a man who lost his home in the Katrina storm. He told me, “Once I got through that, I figured I could get through anything.”
Then, his wife died of cancer. Again, “Once I got through that, I figured I could get through anything.”
Then, with everything he had left in a van, while driving in Florida, he was in an accident and the van caught fire.
He stood on the roadside with nothing but whatever was in his pants pockets.
“Now that I have gone through that, I can go through anything,” he said.
He had the faith and the character to embrace something larger than life as an anchor.
He had, and still has, the understanding of God’s presence, which supercedes all losses. With this, he was able to keep a hold on hope. He could have given up, but he didn’t, because he was aware of something, or Someone, larger than all his misfortune.
It is often true that someone else must come along and provide hope for the one who cannot muster it. Each of us has enough hope in us to share. No hoarding, now!