In this series
In this series
Henny Youngman began his famous comedy routine, “Take my wife—please.” I’m beginning this series of columns, “Take Gil Rife Jr.—please.”
I spent hours with Gil at Eden Village, a Missouri homeless community where I stayed for six days in October 2023. Of all the homeless people in this series of columns, Gil is the only one whose whole name I’ll use. He’s 68 and beyond worrying about someone searching the internet to determine whether he might be a risky hire.
Stroking his long beard, Gil told me he served as a Marine sharpshooter in Afghanistan in 1989. (Marines didn’t go into combat in Afghanistan until October 2001.) He said he was the oldest of 15 children—born to parents who were alcoholics and “didn’t believe in watching TV”—but the other 14 are all dead.
Gil said he worked on construction starting at age 15, married at 17, had short-term jobs all over Florida but lost two houses to hurricanes, and has three great-grandkids: triplets. He said he became homeless after renting an apartment sight-unseen and paying first and last month’s rent plus a security account to its apparent owner, who turned out not to own it.
I have a reporter’s skepticism about some of Gil’s stories but no doubts about the grim reality of homelessness in many US cities. As I’ll show, America in 2026 has about 75 percent more people than in 1966 but probably five times the homeless population. Earlier this year, Yahoo News reran the sensational headline “6 U.S. Cities Where Fear of Homelessness has Reached Crisis Level, Survey Finds.”
For many of us, though, homelessness is out of sight and therefore out of mind—yet our Christian consciences nag us. Gil was mostly out of sight when he became homeless and lived in the woods with a battery-operated TV as company. Then he became “tired of freezing my ass off,” he said. He counted two heart attacks and eight mini-strokes as evidence that he was “too ornery to die.”
I know from my research that many Americans have one of two ways of dealing with a story like Gil’s. If you tend toward social Darwinism—the belief that animal and human existence is a constant combat for survival of the fittest—you might think the long-term homeless are basically unfit. Attempts to help them cost too much and are too likely to fail to be worthwhile. In short, let Gil freeze. Of course, few people say that out loud.
Social universalism is at the other pole ideologically, but equally deterministic: All lives are biologically conditioned. Not just the mentally ill but many others cannot help themselves. They nevertheless deserve support, especially in a competitive society. Gil said he didn’t “like the taste” of drugs, but social universalists would say that even if he did, so what? Give him an apartment.
Social Darwinism sees Gil as a failure undeserving of support. Social universalism sees him as a failure deserving support. Neither affirms his dignity and agency, and as a Christian, my challenge is to see Gil as a fellow sinner, neither more nor less worthy than me. I need new eyes to imagine Gil, even in his 60s, as a giver rather than a taker.
The folks at Eden Village, where I met Gil, have seen this during the seven years Gil has lived there. He became a fix-it man, repairing what’s broken. He told me about patching the holes left behind by meth users who “busted the cabinets.” Gil made the repairs—and did a good job, one staffer said.
The history of Gil’s two pandemic-era stimulus checks is also illuminating: With the first, he bought himself a motor scooter. With the second, after finding community in the homeless village, he bought a grill big enough for a crowd. He was thinking of others.
And they thought of him. One Saturday, Gil and a dozen tiny-home neighbors were barbecuing on his grill. He had chest cramps. Staffers were not there, but the group of long-term homeless people took charge. One looked at him and said, “Your lips are blue.” Another called an ambulance. Two stents later, Gil came back: “My neighbors saved my life.”
Paul wrote to the Philippians, “It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment” (1:9, ESV). The Greek word translated as knowledge is epignosis, meaning knowledge based on personal involvement with the object of that knowledge, not abstract understanding. Commentator J. B. Lightfoot described epignosis as “tact which knows how to apply principles to particular cases.”
Gil needed not capital-L Love—love as a bloodless, distant ideal—but love here and now. Social Darwinism is cruel, but social universalism is emotive rather than wise, unable to distinguish between what is generous and what merely feels generous.
This series of reports on homelessness in America will try to show, with special detail based on the weeks I’ve lived at homeless shelters with specific people, how we might distinguish between what is generous and what merely feels generous regarding the homeless.
C. S. Lewis wrote that God is not “a senile benevolence” who “drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way.”True help means treating all we encounter not as morsels among masses but as humans made in God’s image. Each deserves the opportunity to pursue happiness as God intends.
