A cold day...

Walking out the door this morning, I was greeted by a chilly breeze and thin icy raindrops. I was on my way to do some early morning community service. I chose to go to St. Vincent's, a homeless shelter/soup kitchen, in downtown SLC.
Shutting the car door, I turned up the heater and lit a smoke. I couldn't believe how cool it was...
Little did I know, Reality was about to swiftly and smartly kick me between the legs.
I had been to this place before to help out and so it wasn't a shock to see the scores of people huddled in doorways or leaning against the building to keep dry.
It is what people do when they don't want to get rained on, right?
After I had been there a couple hours and breakfast was almost ready to be served, I went around back to grab a few quick puffs.
That is when I met Rashawn.
Rashawn came over to me and asked if he could buy 2 cigarettes (the bus stop and day labor going rate is 25 cents each). By the looks of him, I was quite sure he didn't have the half buck and if he did...he needed it worse than me.
I just gave him two.
He's a handsome guy and close to my height. He is white, but his face held a leathered and tanned quality. He looked like, at one time, he had been very fit, athletic. Maybe tennis had been his game...
But that was in the past...not now.
Even with the soaked sweatshirt he was wearing, I could tell he only weighed about 130lbs.
He wasn't much more than a frame of a man.
I asked him how he got this place...to this point in his life...

...it broke my heart...

Rashawn was an out-of-state college student living in Utah. He had a major in computer science and, as he said, a reasonably good GPA (by the way he spoke, I believe him). He was working at a fine dining restaurant and it paid just well enough for him to afford a place of his own.
Life was clicking along quite fine. He had his future set, he had plans, goals...
One day, the restaurant closed down and he was without work.
The little money he had quickly ran out and he couldn't pay his rent. Soon, he was evicted. He had nowhere to go and in the embarrassing rush to get out, he forgot to grab a folder which had his ID, Social Security Card, and Birth Certificate...by the time he remembered and came back to get them, they were in trash bag headed for the city dump.

That was two years ago.

Sitting there, listening to his story and fighting back tears, I felt ashamed of myself.
I was cold.
How dare I be cold? How can I even think such a thing? Rashawn's life is cold...and it isn't even winter yet. This guy has no family, no home...and I'm cold.
I felt like such an ass.
I needed to get back to help finish breakfast, but before I went in, I handed him two more smokes...I didn't know what else I could do...what do you offer a person with nothing?
Before I walked inside, he looked at me with huge forlorn tears in his eyes and said, "You know, I can work almost any job. I want to work. I just can't, because I don't have anything to prove who I am. No one will hire me."
I shut the door and walked inside, warming instantly...and hated myself for it.