When Christa came up with this idea six+ years ago, I have to admit I had a lot of skepticism that it could work and be sustainable. But as a pessimist, I am used to being WRONG. And this was one of those times. Because of Christa’s vision/hope and the encouragement and contribution of many others who saw the possibilities for this, this weird counter-culture experiment in hospitality has worked. And it has been sustainable and satisfying. IF anything, it’s taught me some humbling lessons about my own selfishness and misguided prejudices. Here’s a few things I’ve learned.

1. It’s not nearly as scary to help people who need it as it is not to.
   In our culture we are taught to fear just about everything. From the food we eat, to the people we meet, to the countries that border us, to the “strangers” in our neighborhoods, fear is our lingua franca—it’s our currency. And we trade, buy, and sell in it all too often, bartering away precious bits of our soul in the process. I was scared of what could happen if we let strangers into our “realm” (into our “home”) not based on fact, but based almost entirely on fear or risk or inconvenience. But the reality is that when you let go of fear and ask the question “what if” with appropriate humility and the willingness to try it, you’ll find that solutions present themselves in more ways than one. You’ll find that other people may be able to come alongside you and make it happen and make it less scary. Inertia that is fear-based (or exists in the absence of any form of hope) is the worse alternative to taking some calculated risk in my opinion—whatever that risk may be.
2. People that face homelessness are usually only different from me in one significant way: they have weak or non-existent social support networks and the accompanying coping skills that come with having those things. When life throws tragedy at many people (in the form of sickness, job loss, addiction, divorce, abandonment, etc.) they (we) have people in their (our) life who can help them/us through it. A network of support usually exists in the form of family, friends, or colleagues, a church, a community, a program that they/we can plug into. Many folks facing homelessness (and I know it’s not all) merely lack these buffers that act as shelters against the hurricanes of life. Their family isn’t there or can’t help. They’ve become isolated from friends or colleagues that could/would help. The church or the community doesn’t know about their needs or can’t help them in any meaningful, tangible way. Even when the root cause that may have lead to homelessness is based on poor individual decisions, when you unpack those decisions, you see systemic problems related to a lack of important social networks and the nurture (and decision making process) that comes with it. (And I’m not even a social worker. This is just what I’ve noticed in the stories from those we’ve hosted.)
3. The snowball effect of tragedy is magnified when the poverty is intractable.
   If I were to lose my job, I’d be just fine. I have savings, I have work experience and live where work is readily available, I have two degrees, I have a wife who works, I have family, I have friends, I have enough life experience and common sense taught to me through my social structures (family, friends, church, etc) to know how to manage my budget and take advantage of systems that can help me while I am unemployed. I could only be in tractable poverty—i.e. poverty I could get myself out. Were I not to have those things at my disposal, losing my job could be devastating and potentially life-altering (e.g. intractable)? I could lose my house, my savings, the ability to take care of my kids. It can happen super fast. Get one eviction on your record to see how quickly you can lose it all. This is not a political stance as much as it is an acknowledgement that life is really fragile and it can go from awesome to awful very quickly (as we all know). For some, this downward path can be accelerated and compounded quickly.
4. There aren’t ANY rules for how you can help people. You can make them up as you go along.
   Maybe housing the homeless isn’t your thing. Helping people with drug problems isn’t my thing. Cleaning up the forests or policing the streets of Seattle, also not my thing. One could argue, and I often have, that helping the homeless isn’t really my thing either. (It’s Christa’s! And I support it 150%.) But, at least it’s SOME THING. Something within my family’s range of tolerance that we could latch onto in a small effort to make the world a little better for others (and ourselves). Christa set out with an idea and a specific way she wanted to achieve it. She had a community (many of you) that helped her figure out the gotchas and bring it to fruition (good on ya!). For example, we didn’t want to have the overwhelming task of choosing which homeless person to help and which to not help. The needs are bigger than any of us. We wanted to be strategic, selective, and targeted, and help those who fit a specific circumstances, in order to invest in those who needed temporary help that could really give them leverage for recovery. So we worked with experts at Interfaith Family Housing to find out if there was a way to do this. We, being Christa, built a solution with boundaries that were on our terms, but that required some risk and some flexibility and some work BUT (magically) it was also successful in helping SOME families every year. It’s the SOME THING again, right? All this to say, you can happily  f*** the rules. You can make whatever rules you want to (for the most part) and find a path to achieve something outside of yourself without risking the loss of yourself. After all, I call myself the “silent partner” in this whole experiment in hospitality. If I can be a silent partner than you can be the Ambassador of Kindness at the local restaurant you go to, or the Supplier of Crayons at your local elementary school. (I honestly don’t know what your THING is, so please fill in the banks here.)
5. Smart, hard-working, self-starting people can and do face homelessness. Everyone has a story. We’ve had a former Amazon employee (not a warehouse worker either), a receptionist, two-income parents, a waitress, and an ex-Microsoft tech stay in Beloved’s room-to name just a few. Not all of these are happy stories, some tragedies are self-inflicted, but most have their roots in a great suffering. We all know suffering and I could relate to their sad (very real) stories. Living in one’s car or on the street IS a logical outcome to many of the things that happened. In the choose-your-own-adventure of life, some pages just end in a scary cave no matter what page you turn to. It wasn’t that the person didn’t try or didn’t care or gave in to laziness or despair. In fact, this is rarely the case with those we’ve housed.
6. Sometimes your heart might not be in it, and that’s OK, too.
   With any risk/reward endeavor, there will be days where you just kind of shrug your shoulders and say “meh, whatever”. This is frequently my posture when it comes to doing any work in Beloved’s Room. I helped get Beloved Room constructed, not because I have any building skills but because I was free labor (and thankful for our “contractor” James who really knew what he was doing and could deal with the unskilled so patiently). We built Beloved’s Room from the ground up, digging trenches, jackhammering concrete, putting in plumbing, hanging drywall, and assembling IKEA furniture. These are not things I love to do (or ever want to do again), but at the end of the day I was glad to see SOME THING where before there was NOTHING. Every now and then Christa asks me to help move the bunk beds or vacuum up the room before a guest arrives, and I usually groan. (She says I’m a grump and she’s 100% right.) But I do it anyway. Not because my heart is in it, but because it’s a small price to pay to help pay it forward. You don’t have to like it; sometimes you just have to do it. I’ve done a pretty good job of pretending to be a motivational speaker in this post, but really that’s all poetic license. If anything, I want to convey that Beloved’s Room is possible because GOOD is possible in this world when people believe in ideas (no matter how crazy) and look beyond themselves, even just a little bit. Some people call that good “God” and I’m fine with that. Call it whatever you want. Whatever it is, we need more of it. Christa and I, the Johnsons, we’re not really much different from other people. The people who stay in Beloved’s Room are not really much different from us. And you all…well, you people are all different, and really weird, and probably much, much better people than us, but we won’t hold that against you. (Ha,ha, gotcha. Didn’t I?)

Thanks for helping us make this wacky thing called Beloved’s Room a reality and for keeping up with our experiment. Keep on truckin’