kingdom of God Springfield, MA
by Shirley Li
PAT MURRAY
city itself, only to the immediate people we come into contact with and are blessed to be in relationship with. The city is still suffering from the same challenges.” This is perhaps obvious – that a small group of individuals would struggle to change the landscape of a city on any dramatic scale in just ten years. The kind of “very, very long, longterm investment” that Pat speaks of is not entirely unexpected but still foreign to me, an exercise in steadfastness and in patience that I only comprehend in bits and pieces, if at all. In this gradual process of transformation, Pat ventures that thus far they have seen one visible change: in themselves. For seven years, Pat has been a regular at a Bible study at Springfield’s Loaves and Fishes Church. He confesses that he initially attended hoping to “help” the homeless folks there, “to bring them Jesus and save some souls, lives, that sort of thing.” Although this has occasionally been the case, more often than not the opposite has been true. Pat relates how the people on the streets have become his teachers, offering him a compelling picture of what the kingdom of God looks like. “They impact our lives when they get by on so much less than we do and still love God in the midst of all of that. And some of them are fairly happy people. We tend to worry and get concerned about things that Jesus
wouldn’t even think about getting concerned about.” As a result, the Nehemiah community has also been freed to live more simply and thankfully: “They help us become more humble, more appreciative of what we do have, and more generous with what we do have. Because we have been changed and taught by the people on the streets of the city, our community holds a little less tightly to our money and things.” From the way Pat speaks, it is clear that these are no longer just “people on the streets” to him, but friends. Pat explains that he never had this privilege before coming to live in Springfield. “My friends were all lawyers and doctors and accountants, plumbers, certainly accomplished people in the trade fields, and things like that. I never knew a homeless person until I came here. So it’s an amazing thing when some of my friends now are folks who have spent a lot of their lives on the streets.” At first, the implications of this aren’t immediately apparent to me. It doesn’t sound so difficult to care for and befriend a homeless person – but on second thought, I have to confess I don’t have any. This kind of deep engagement over weeks stretching into months requires much more than my infrequent dabbling in community service. The members of the Nehemiah community have deliberately chosen this way of life, and all these Fall 2012
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