Robert used to do temporary contract work when he was younger, but after fifty, he started experiencing health problems. "I had a heart attack, and after that, I couldn't do those hard things. I had to back off and now there's no money or much of anything, except to sit at the bottom with picking up cans, looking through trash cans, dumpsters. Whatever I can do to get a little bit of either money or food... that has become my life because of getting old. I just turned fifty-five this week. I don't know what I'm going to do now. I suppose I'm just condemned to this unless some miracle happens. I don't see any way out of it."
Robert divulged about how he survives on a daily basis in the homeless camps around Fort Worth. "The camping is something I had to learn because I come out on to the streets, like a lot of people, not knowing. I have had to learn how to gather food, to keep water. I had to learn how to get light... I get some wax, take it as cheap as I can get it, make me a wick and a can lid, and melt that wax over that wick to get my light. I had to learn how to get materials to build me a shelter, I had to learn places to go and not to go. Some people are real touchy about private property, but then there's other places people just don't care. Wherever I'm at, I'm being quiet. You do everything you can to keep from being noticed in that spot. When you see people gathering up together, you've got to get away from them because the law enforcement aren't going to allow tent cities."
For Robert, it's living out in nature that presents the biggest trials. "Protecting yourself from the weather, especially the wet. You don't realize how moisture can get to you. Even if you're not in the rain, that humidity just soaks into stuff. I try to save clothes that I get from Christian people – they will get moldy, they will just fall apart. That has been a learning experience for the last ten years... the older I've gotten, the more susceptible I am to the elements. Cleaning up is maybe the biggest problem because, in a camp, if I take my clothes off, I've got mosquitoes to deal with. And when there ain't that, it's the cold. I have had experiences, like I tried to use river water to wash, but then I got an infection once from a little cut on my arm. It turned into a nightmare. I had red streaks on my arm, one hundred degree temperatures, all my lymphnodes swoll up, it was horrible. So I've had to learn how to deal with that too. A lot of times I just don't deal with it."
Robert doesn't seek out shelters for a place to stay because he feels it makes you too reliable on the system. "At least for me," he stresses, "I would just be injecting myself onto a situation where I can't maintain myself; to where I'm constantly dependent on the government to give me a check here, food stamps there or whatever. Besides, a lot of these places, I can not stand: the walk-in missions, the Salvation Army, being around that crowd of people, I can't stand it... That's why I decided I'd get as good as I can at camping."
Mike Myers of Beautiful Feet Ministries has helped Robert visualize how to best live his life, regardless of if he's sleeping on the streets. "Reverend Mike has said that we have the wrong 'T' word; that we're 'trying' instead of 'trusting.' I started trying to integrate that into my mind because I would push so hard with stuff and my physical capabilities were such that I couldn't push hard. Gradually, I saw how, if I just kept moving, God would fill in the blanks in odd ways that would totally surprise me. So I stopped pushin'. I just wander around and I do the best I can and I get what I need. The 'trusting' thing has... really kind of changed my life. It's hard to say that, after fifty years that one thing like this could make so much difference. It's about not worrying and always having that faith in God. Of all my experience, [trusting] and forgiveness has made all the difference."
Despite his circumstances, he sees God's provision through every situation. "God has helped me with all those things: the camps, food... there's nothing he hasn't helped me with. He's let me know that His joy was what I needed and that it was better than any of those things because it's complete. I was the type where, if I'm about to run out of something... I'm already worrrying about it. It was really hard for me to look at God first for all those needs. The 'trying' and 'trusting' thing was what turned me around. I stopped worrying about it."
Great testimonies, Dylan.
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