City of Brotherly Love

A couple days ago, while briefly talking with my brother, I learned about a Korean woman who had asked for money while on his usual route for work. In so many words he told me she looked run down and strung out. The telltale signs of an addict written all over her person, on her ragged face, in her stringy hair and cracked nails.

In my ignorance, I exclaimed my shock at hearing she was Korean. Being surrounded by hard-working and often work-addicted, successful, studious and often Christian Korean-Americans, to hear of "one of our own" as a drug addict ripped a hole in my perception. I was saddened and confused. And while I processed the day he (my brother) had had, about smelling the stench of death in the air in some of the neighborhoods he traveled through, I thought about the Korean woman who'd come to my mom, aunt, her employee and myself a lifetime ago.

It was about 10 years ago when she had first stepped into my aunt's grocery to panhandle. She was a timid woman, and the years on the streets had visibly broken her. She wore her pain and her addictions about her like a chain tethering her to an tangible despair. She would frequent my aunt's store and visit with my mother. They would buy her some staples from the local deli/butcher shop and talk with her trying to uncover her story, about how she, a once beautiful woman with cascading black hair, had become this torn, broken, lost soul now before them.

After some time, my mom somehow convinced her to come with them to a shelter downtown. She'd heard about it from a deacon at her church who volunteered there. It was an ordeal. She made excuses, lied, grew angry and defensive, cursed them out and all the while they (my mom, aunt and my aunt's employee) pleaded with her to get in the car. They feared for this fellow Korean sister. They feared for her life.

I'd all but forgotten about this woman until my brother had told me about the woman he'd met. Part of me grew sad, thinking it was the same woman who we'd driven to the shelter years ago. So, in curiosity, I asked my mom if she knew whatever had happened to the woman who'd stumbled onto her store block. With a nonchalant tone that masked a hint of sadness, she told me that the woman had died a few years ago. The deacon at her church had seen her at the shelter off and on throughout the following years, but heard rather recently that she'd died of what I can only assume was an overdose.




Living just outside the center of the action (so to speak) in Center City, I often forget (ignore) the brokenness that surrounds me. I turn a blind eye and heart to the suffering world around me, the world outside of my own that is wailing for relief, pleading for a savior.

Philly is a hard place to live. The contrast in classes, of the haves and the have-nots is evident for those who truly know this "city of brotherly love."

Blocks from the beautiful scenery that surrounds the rivers and the chic Rittenhouse Square area, live the suffering and the broken. Minutes from the gorgeous brownstones and cobblestone streets of Olde City, past the Liberty Bill and the National Constitution Center and a breath away from the up-and-coming areas of Fairmount, Graduate Hospital, Bella Vista, Queen's Village and Northern Liberties, lie the dying and the suffering.

I have heard of children giving into the sexual pressures I'd only witnessed in my teens and college years. Hundreds of child-mothers and the fatherless. Children having children. The blind leading the blind.

I have come across the strung out, the drunk, the lost and, instead of receiving them with Christ's love, I have pushed them away. Growing up in an urban city will do that to you, it'll cause you to grow a thick skin, to become callous. And I wrestle with that more and more these days. I hear Christ's challenge echoing a whisper in the deepest, most hidden parts of my heart, itching it's way to the surface:

Clothe them.
Feed them.
Love them as I have loved you.
Love them as you love Me.
Die for them your brothers.

And still my heart refuses, blinded by myself, crippled in fear, calloused by the status quo and what is considered "acceptable" behavior for the sophisticated urbanite.

As Annie Parson's has prayed, "Lord, distract me from myself."