If you live in or around Asheville – or most other cities run by liberals – you’ve likely had your fill of the mischief associated with the term “homeless.”

Though the left likes to conjure up images of innocent hard-working victims of circumstance – “I got laid off from the blanket factory when they sent the knitting mill to China” – only rarely are people living on the street operating out of anything close to that script.

So, what is the deal? How should conservatives, Christians, realists and culturists respond to this growing social darkness?

Glad you asked.

Living in faith helps –

Jesus told us – clearly, decisively and irreversibly – that our number one charge as followers is to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.”

Anyone finding shortcuts around this, the summary commandment, is at risk for being a Christian pretender. That’s a dangerous dedication.

We demonstrate our love for God by following his stated will. It’s that simple – but simple does not mean easy.

Loving our neighbor is more complex.

On a fallen world, there are so many daily man-made/deceiver-encouraged challenges that it can be really tough to find our way through the haze.

But there’s a nice thing about love as a sincere mission. As long as we keep our deeper eye on that compass heading, we may fail at times, but over the long course we’ll find ourselves steadily working toward God versus the opposition.

Love is always tough – 

One of the more “in-our-face” love challenges of today is the question of how one should respond to the homelessness issue. In the face of relentless social deceptions and manipulations, the answer is mightily demanding.  

Right out of the gate, we’re all called on to work hard – sometimes extra hard -----– to resist the temptation of judgment.

Even if we are technically right about “That guy is a drug-addicted predator abusing the community as he pretends to be an innocent victim,” judging others, and the lubricated condemnation that so often goes with it, is not our job.

Thankfully, God reserves that program for himself. That’s because time and time again it is demonstrated that honesty, objectivity, knowledge, maturity and grace in judgment is a combination that mankind finds extremely difficult.

Staying real —

Lest one be discouraged, this does not mean that we’re stuck with passively surrendering to the rainbow of human absurdities. We are very much supported in employing the powers of discernment – or the united application of wisdom, experience, biblical sincerity, prayer/reflection and realism.

We can do that.

For example, discernment tells us that to get between a man and his bad choices is to undercut God. That’s playing God — and none of us are good at that.

Discernment tells us that to support a man in bad choices is an unloving act called ‘enabling’ and that enabling is more about a vanity fix for the enabler than a helping hand for the enabled.

Discernment tells us that under most circumstances, giving money to a begging person may temporarily ease our conscience, but that fix comes at the expense of the future of the stumbling recipient.

Discernment tells us that bad personal choices are the primary reason most people end up homeless, and that economic hardship, mental health issues, addiction and criminal behavior almost always begin with hardships made infinitely harder by bad choices evolving into bad habits.

Discernment tells us there is no way we can help anyone without at least some measure of personal accountability and some dedication to modifying their choices, behaviors and efforts to reach for something better.

Discernment also tells us that Christians and other loving people are persistently called on to give to the poor. But being poor through events beyond our control is different than poverty as a byproduct of a destructive lifestyle – just as death from disease is different from death by suicide.

What you can do–

So, what do we do or don’t do to help our homeless fellow-man?

Putting people in boundaryless warehouses to congregate and reinforce one another’s bad behavior is a don’t.

Removing or impairing the rule of law is a don’t.

Supporting tent cities is a don’t for the same reason warehousing is a don’t.

Playing softball with an out-of-control drug culture that constantly snares new recruits and thus grows our addiction and homeless problem is a don’t.

The do is clear – support programs, leaders, initiatives who apply the five-fingers of (1) realism (2) a personal accountability script over a victim script (3) mental health and addiction treatment that addresses symptoms, underlying causes, and bad choices (4) skills training combined with opportunities for success and (5) boundless applications of love, charity and safety – all in the same package.

Experience dependably demonstrates that no man-made/man-scripted intervention can pull off all of these things at the same time.