Witnessing Hope
Written by Joe Hamby, Director of Community Education
It was 2:30 on a Friday afternoon at Roof Above’s Day Services Center. I was tying up loose ends when my phone rang. It was one of our neighbors, twenty-seven-year-old LJ. “Joe, I have a job interview.” He’d been applying for jobs with no luck since he returned from prison several weeks back. “When?” I asked. “Right now. I’m standing next to your car.” Oh.
It was just registering with me that my afternoon plans were history when he informed me, “I need a button-down shirt to wear.” No housing options available to him, no family to return to, LJ had been staying at our Lucile Giles Center night-by-night shelter since his release. And he had worn the same jeans and collarless shirt every day — not his desired interview attire. The only button-down shirt I had was the one I was wearing. Uh-oh. Thank God for the Roof Above hoodie that was hanging off the back of my chair.
My shirt-on-loan coordinated nicely with his jeans. He pulled his locs back to present a polished, Harvard post-doc vibe. And off we went.
An hour later, he returned triumphantly to my car. He got the job. Seasonal work. But lots of hours starting in a week. He called his girl to tell her the good news. Now, both were working and a place of their own seemed, unbelievably, like a possibility.
A thousand brave steps. Each one of them met with resistance. But, little by little, nothing turns into something. Our neighbors’ all-too-common odyssey.
In his 1999 book, “A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League,” Ron Suskind writes of Cedric, the main character: “He had hope in a better world he could not yet see that overwhelmed the cries of ‘you can’t’ or ‘you won’t’ or ‘why bother.’”
Every day at Roof Above, neighbors, like LJ, hope in a future they cannot see. Hope, when everything in their world says hope is a fool’s errand. Model a hope that refuses to accept “uh-oh” as a final answer. Every day at Roof Above, we are awestruck witnesses to a hope that roars. Congratulations, LJ.