Farewell

After writing weekly for three years, this is column #156 and my last in Fix Homelessness. Three conclusions:

1. “Housing First” is profoundly inhumane. Encouraging people to commit suicide by enabling their addiction — now you can drug and drink in privacy — is wrong. All drugs are not the same. People can live with a weed habit. People die with a meth habit or years of alcoholism. When addiction incapacitates a person, the right principle is Deal With Addiction First.
2. The same principle goes for mental illness. Freedom’s not another word for no thinking left to lose. When a person goes from muttering to himself to hearing his own muttering plus voices yelling at him, it’s not kind to leave him alone. When medication can help as it often does, any provision of housing should be dependent on taking meds under supervision.
3. I’ve seen hard-core addicts, after initial withdrawal, helped by busyness: Work not only helps financially but turns destructive idleness into productive activity. I’ve seen mentally ill women make delicious chocolate chip cookies. Even at the extreme, work works. For the able-bodied and able-minded, work is even more important. Yes, people should have public shelter right away, but should earn their own private space. Work First, Apartments Second.

That’s based on what I’ve seen up close. More important is what God says, since this world and our lives are His invention. Chapter two of Genesis shows that God works: “On the seventh day God finished his work that he had done.” Adam goes to work right away: “God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”

Life becomes hard after one very bad day in the garden, which ends with God declaring that Adam and Eve in their labor will have pain, sweat, and encounters with thorns and thistles. Nevertheless, we must work. Chapter 20 of Exodus includes a non-negotiable command: “Six days you shall labor, and do all your work.” God continues His labor by carving out Ten Commandments: “The tablets were the work of God.”

In God’s mercy, we can take pride in being productive. Some work includes artistry with “fine twined linen and blue and purple and scarlet yarns.” Chapter 28 of Deuteronomy shows God’s desire to “bless you in all your produce and in all the work of your hands, so that you will be altogether joyful.”

Altogether joyful. We’re made to work. In the book of Proverbs, God notes that “a worker’s appetite works for him.” We do not have a guarantee of success, but in general, “whoever works his land will have plenty of bread.” Laziness is destructive. “Whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys.”

In the New Testament, Paul sets an apostolic example by working as a tentmaker as well as an evangelist and serving not only spiritually but materially. No work, no charity, but Paul insists in chapter 23 of Acts, “In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak.”

Paul tells residents of Corinth, “We labor, working with our own hands,” and says that all who believe in God “have no right to refrain from working for a living.” He maintains that position throughout his epistles, and tells Colossians that “whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.”

In my first column this month, I quoted Paul’s strongest admonition: “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). Work helps others but also helps ourselves, as Paul told Timothy, his assistant: “Those who don’t work become ‘busybodies.'”

That’s the choice for many homeless people as well: stay busy or become busybodies, and in the process hurt their own bodies, minds, and hearts. True compassion is not helping a person commit suicide. It is helping people to work to the best of their ability. After three years of writing, I’ve gone back to work as Christianity Today‘s Executive Editor for News and Global. Harder bargaining might have gotten me for Galactic as well, but I’m content, and thankful to Discovery Institute and those who have read these columns.

Farewell, with a plea that you and I help homeless individuals to fare well.