Coming Into the Light

http://www.starexponent.com/cse/news/local/article/coming_into_the_light/26832/


By Allison Brophy ChampionPublished: December 24, 2008

After three months living on the streets of Culpeper, Paul, a Norfolk native and Navy veteran, got used to surviving on five hours sleep.

“It wasn’t that bad actually. It was summer time. And once you get into the pattern of not getting eight hours sleep, it’s easy for you,” said the astonishingly upbeat 23-year-old, interviewed last week in a local coffee shop.

Some nights, he slept in a car. Other nights the park was his home or he’d wait outside the Laundromat until they opened back up early mornings.

“I would get up maybe 6 or 7 when the sun came out and go look for a job,” Paul said, talking quietly, sometimes unable to remember exact details of his homelessness. “Time kind of flies by fast. The winter time was actually the time I needed help.”

Someone must have been listening because little did he know, help was on the way.

A friend in need
The week before Thanksgiving, as temperatures dipped, the Culpeper Ministerial Association rallied quickly to launch the county’s first-ever overnight church shelter program. Every week since, various churches have opened their doors and hearts to provide a warm place to sleep and a hot meal for people in need, like Paul.

He heard about it from a passing acquaintance, someone in a situation similar to his, and for the past week or so, Paul has made the church his home.

“It’s been wonderful actually. People have been nice, open arms, real courteous,” he said. “I can’t even really describe how it’s changed my life.”

Besides shelter, Paul gained a mentor in the church leader helping to host the program the week he came to stay.

The Rev. G.W. Dameron, pastor at City on a Hill Church, saw something special in Paul.

“From the first evening that I met him, I wanted to hear his story and he was very open and honest about everything he’s been struggling with, his childhood,” said Dameron, who moved to Culpeper from California with his wife and three daughters in June to open the nondenominational church on Sperryville Pike.

“I look at Paul and I see the potential. There is so much potential there.”

He doesn’t want to be in the situation he’s in, Dameron said, and is looking to turn his life around. All Paul needed was a helping hand, he added.

“This is a guy who’s got his whole life ahead of him. Sometimes every one of us finds ourselves in a situation where just need a little bit of help. We need to be rescued and if the church isn’t going to be the place where that can happen then we are not being the church the way God has called us to be.”

For Paul, it was a long road to rescue.

Difficult childhoodGrowing up in Norfolk in a broken home, he found little stability. Along with numerous siblings, Paul bounced around from foster home to foster home, dropping out of high school in the ninth grade.

“My mom was a drug addict, still is,” he said. “I don’t think she’s even surviving by herself so I know she can’t take care of me or provide shelter for me.”

At age 18, Paul earned his GED and joined the Navy, serving three years working on planes and helicopters on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

He even saw time in Iraq in 2003, though Paul downplayed the service — maybe because his younger brother is still over there serving in the Army.

“I didn’t see any live fire, but I did see them drop a bomb,” he said of his six months overseas.
Paul decided not to re-enlist after three years; instead, he married a woman from Culpeper he met vacationing at the beach. She was older, he said, and eventually convinced him to move here in 2005 with the promise of better job opportunities.

Homeless for the first timeThey got a small apartment, but it was not easy making it, especially on minimum wage; for his first job in Culpeper, he made pizzas. For a while, Paul worked construction during the height of the building boom, “And we made it pretty good for a while.”
Things really started looking up when Paul secured a decent job making $15 an hour at a local factory. He worked there for more than a year before getting laid off, absorbing a major pay cut as he returned to fast-food employment.

The financial pressure eventually took its toll on his marriage, and things began to fall apart, Paul said. He lost his place last October, but was able to stay with a friend and former co-worker for about six months.

But then the house his friend was renting got sold and he moved back north.

“We all went our separate ways,” Paul said, and he was homeless, officially, for the first time in his life.

He didn’t let it get him down though, saying he’s not a depressed person or the kind who wallows away their sorrows in a bottle. And being from the city, Paul was used to walking and could get around that way for work or on the town’s trolleys.

“I just make things work,” he said, adding, “I know people in worse situations. I feel myself to be blessed actually. I just keep focused on my goals.”

Those goals, however, did not include a one-month stint in the county jail, where Paul found himself recently after violating a protective order associated with his marriage. At least he didn’t have to sleep outside.

When Paul got out a couple weeks ago, the church shelter program was up and running.
Here, he found hope for the first time in a long time.

Brighter daysThese days, with the help of Pastor Dameron, Paul is working toward a brighter future. He plans to enroll in the commercial driver’s license course offered at the George Washington Carver trade academy on U.S. 15 and is taking steps toward steady employment at a big-box store.

“Hopefully one day I want to drive trucks and open my own trucking business. I want to see the world outside of Virginia,” he said. “And be with my family, my brother, when he comes back from Iraq.”

Paul is even considering picking up a second trade, heavy equipment operator, at Carver so that he’ll always have something viable to fall back on and be less susceptible to layoffs.

And he’ll spend Christmas with the Dameron family, something about which Paul is very excited and appreciative.

“It’s really phenomenal what he does for people, opening up his house giving me a place to come for Christmas. I haven’t had a family Christmas dinner in so long I can’t remember.”

Pastor Dameron said it’s the least he could do. God has blessed his family tremendously, he said, and so who is he to hoard it all for himself?

God is doing “amazing things” in Culpeper, the pastor went on, “groundbreaking things that the community has never seen,” like the church shelter program.

“In history of Culpeper, they’ve never seen Episcopalians, Lutherans, Baptists, nondenominational, Methodists coming together to serve together and be the body of Christ. That’s never happened and it’s happening right now.”

There are lessons to be learned all along the way. What we can learn from someone like Paul, Dameron said, is not to take things for granted, especially in these unstable times.
“It can be taken from you in a second. As much as we plan, as much as we think everything’s going to be hunky dory, things change overnight. That’s the world we live in.”

To care for the homeless is to care for Jesus, who was also homeless, Dameron said, traveling around Israel preaching the word and performing miracles.

At night, friends and followers sheltered him.

“The Word says, ‘When you do these kinds of things for others, you are doing them for me.’ That’s powerful when you begin to think of how profound that is,” he said.


Champion can be reached at 825-0771 ext. 101 or abrophy@starexponent.com