disrupting the hustle

One thing this naïve country boy has learned over the years of ministry with folks on the street is the reality of the hustle.

What’s the hustle?

The hustle is the distinct bag of self preserving skills – deceptions, tricks, sales tactics, defenses – that allow an individual to survive a jungle of adversity that comes with life on the streets.

The hustle isn’t learned overnight. It’s a way, a paradigm, a lifestyle developed over years of responding to trauma, severe dissapointments, and oppression.

When well-meaning folks come to volunteer with us at Network most don’t realize that our displays of tenderness and compassion to folks on the street are upsetting their carefully crafted hustle.

The vast majority of our street friends have endured unimaginable nightmare-like childhoods which necessitated the self-preserving behaviors. The mindset is I determine to not be hurt again and if anybody’s doing the hurting it’s me. I’m in control.

So, when we offer our gifts of eye-contact, calling them by name, and a genuine pursuit of deeper relationship it causes a dizzying disorientation. After years of hustling there’s simply no psychological chategory for no-strings attached compassion.

The responses to our benevolent care can get weird. Some respond by excessive attachment to us. Others interpret our love as some sort of sexual advance while others are triggered into fits of anger and rage.

Like any addictive behavior the process of transformation usually means things will get worse before they get better. Healing only comes after tearing free from the drug, the relationships, and the places that enable the toxic dependence that enslaves them.

Over the years I’ve acquired a theology that reveals God as the divine disruptor of our hustle.