“Do you serve hot soup in the summer time too?” The question was from a resource partner I was introducing to our work at New York City Relief.
“Yes indeed. We serve the same soup all year round.”
“People still eat it when it’s 90 degrees out?” He seemed surprised.
“Yep. We sure do. We make really good soup.”
As the old adage goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We have a profoundly simple operation. When asked to describe what we do, I like to steal Denzel Washington’s line from the movie Remember the Titans. As the new African-American head coach of a recently integrated high school, Denzel’s character, Coach Herman Boone, passes his play book out to the assistant coaches who used to run the team, prior to boarding a bus for summer training camp. One of the coaches remarks, “awful skinny play book ain’t it?”
Coach Boone replies: “I run 6 plays, split veer. It’s like Novocaine. Just give it time, always works.”
At New York City Relief, we don’t run a lot of plays. We don’t serve coffee with options for cream and sugar, decaf or regular. We don’t give out pants, shirts, sweaters, and underwear. We don’t serve meals with meat, dairy, or even deserts. We serve the same vegetable rice soup, with juice or hot chocolate every day and we give away brand new socks and toiletry kits. That’s pretty much all we “do” but that is no where close to all we “are.”
The little that we “do” we do with excellence and we do with intention. We don’t “mix it up” a whole lot because, like Coach Boone says, “give it time, always works.”
Part of the reason we are able to be out in the streets week in and week out is because our operation is so simple. We offer consistency; rain or shine, we go. We have had some bad winters over the last few years, but we haven’t missed a scheduled outreach since Hurricane Sandy. The people we serve can’t count on a lot, but they can count on us. One person we served described our consistency by saying, “they are faithful, like God is faithful.”
Beyond consistency, we also want to serve with excellence.
It’s the same soup every day, but like I told our new partner, we make good soup! There’s a rumor going around that it might be the best soup in NYC (I have no idea who started it)! We literally prepare our soup fresh every day with healthy ingredients. We also pick up a new batch of Portuguese rolls every day that are always delicious and never old. The socks we distribute run for the retail price of $20 for a pack of 6 and the hygiene kits are all prepackaged and even come with brand-name deodorant.
Not only do we serve consistently and with excellence, but we also strive to communicate dignity to each person that happens upon the Relief Bus or one of our Don’t Walk By outreach teams. We want each person who comes to the Relief Bus to be treated as a paying customer. Valuable. Empowered.
Too many people serving folks who can’t afford to spend money on their meals forget that none of us earns the physical capacity for wealth creation. None of us makes our heart beat properly and reliably. We all exist at the mercy of others, so we are not defined by our net worth or our ability to pay for stuff. Our value comes from God and He says that each person who sleeps in the street is worth Jesus being tortured and ripped apart from everything and everyone He loves. On the cross, Jesus does a price check on each human that has ever lived, and the sticker shock alone should knock us off our feet.
The people we serve have infinite value. They are literally priceless. The least we can do is act like it.
Ultimately, our end goal is to connect the people we serve to resources that could change the trajectory of their lives forever. We want to leverage the credibility we earn by being consistent, serving with excellence, and communicating worth and dignity to save lives. So many people living in the street are fighting for survival. We want to be the exit ramp off of the “highway to hell” and onto the road to redemption.
We build relationships with partner organizations that provide tangible help with things like detox, rehab, discipleship, housing, legal aid, counseling, food stamps, Medicaid, clothing, and many others. But we can’t connect anyone to anything if we aren’t consistent, if we don’t serve with excellence, and we don’t communicate dignity. Everything we do is designed to transform lives, both the lives of the people serving and the people being served. And in the Kingdom of God it’s not always clear which group is which.
