One day I asked my released from prison friend Mike if there was some kind of work he liked to do. Something that didn’t cause stress and he knew he was good at. He said “yard work.”
This was something that didn’t have to do it with people (he doesn’t trust people), he likes being outside in nature (it calms him and he feels closer to God), he could do the physical work and handle the tools for it well (it gives him a sense of worth that he can do something well).
I told him that I envisioned a day when he’d be able to do yard work for Seniors and people in his neighborhood. I felt blessed to be able to help him out in ways he couldn’t help himself right now, and I can see a day when there were going to be people who are needier than he is, and he’d get that sense of blessing to be able to help them and show them God’s love.
My dream is that he’d even get some supplemental money for that service. Not a great “hourly wage” but something to supplement his SSI without going over what he’s allowed to earn. I wanted to help make that happen, with a local church, or charity group in the city…even if I had to help raise $ to fund it.
A couple weeks later Jim and I were visiting an inner city community center. We learned that one of the things they’d enjoyed this past year was a season of serving Seniors in the area through cutting grass is a ministry. One of the staff leaders had loved doing that with some former felons he know, but had been curtailed a few months earlier.
Soon, Mike began working 2-3 days a week with some cash under the table from us. $50-60 a day. The folks at Hope say he’s a blessing to them because he’s not only a good, hard worker, but he’s participating in their staff devotions and meetings. He’s a spark plug for them with vision of what God can do there. We’re only funding 2 days a week. Staff at Hope are kicking in. Mike is so happy there that he’s even volunteering 2 days!
It gives him a sense of purpose and made him feel he was part of a team.
“Hope is my Happy Place!” he says all the time!
Why can’t he just be employed there? They want to hire him for the maximum hours he can work and still keep his disability for mental illness. I got nowhere in trying to reach his case worker at Social Security or at Joe Johnson Behavioral Health in the months before we met the folks at Hope. The Social Worker at Hope is trying to reach them too. Get a definitive answer.
Because…Mike’s fragile, and not really able to be a reliable full time worker, and may be doing good right now, but chances are at some point he will “decompensate”…and not be able to work there if he falls apart, and he will need that SSI then just as he has since he got out of Prison in early December 2020. To get on SSI disability takes moving a mountain; so it’s better to stay on rather than get off and then try to get BACK on.
This isn’t some rainbows and ponies happy ending though. He’s still living with daily trauma and violence and drama with his family members and where he is living. But he has nowhere to move. There is ZERO section 8 housing available, and even no way to sign up on the WAITING LIST for government assistance with housing. This dude has been a REALLY REALLY bad guy in the past. There is a reason doors are closed to him and old relationships are tentative when it comes to trust. I’ve not yet met or heard of any of his connections being anyone who can be of much help anyway. And those fringe family members are taking notice of the changes in him.
It’s hard to live off of $750 disability for his mental illness and $500 under the table. $1250/month. Especially if one [probably] has a drug adiction.
A few months ago he reported that he'd started getting zero in food stamps (but his connection with Hope came just in time – they have a food bank!). He has free health insurance and his strong psych meds are only $16/month. However, he has a $400/month nicotine habit that is hard to break when one has been smoking for 50 years and lives where people are crashing cars, shooting guns, taking drugs, and pulling doors off hinges.
No matter what kind of nicotine patch is available, a few cigarettes a day can help calm the nerves of an old man with PTSD (starting from childhood abuse that he was never rescued from) and Bi-Polar disorder.
I see God at work in coming alongside Mike. I'm just not sure whether he will take the lifeline.
