Bent Hope: A Street Journal
Tim Huff
Castle Quay Books, 2008
ISBN: 1894860365
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Though names and locations have occasionally been changed to protect identities, the stories Tim Huff recounts in Bent Hope are
“snapshots of real times and places, bodies and faces … fragmented glimpses of fragmented lives, where hope is anything but shiny and bright. Unpolished. Crushed. Twisted. Bent hope.”
It was late evening when I first picked up this book. It was early morning when I finally put it down.
With more than twenty years of work among homeless people (mostly youth), Tim Huff is more than qualified to write this book. Though some occurred outside the city limits, and even across the Atlantic, most of the stories recounted here took place within Toronto – “a good city that unwittingly draws Canada’s largest pilgrimage of runaways, hideaways, castaways and throwaways, from small towns and large cities across the nation and even the United States.”
Too many of us find it highly inconvenient, an annoyance really, to be asked for “some change” when walking along a city street. And we have an amazing ability to look straight ahead when a disheveled man or woman stands at the traffic light with that tattered and faded sign seeking help from a compassionate motorist. We keep reminding ourselves that they are merely scam artists preying upon us. And while some are undoubtedly trying to work the system, Huff reminds us that the vast majority are truly needy people.
The twenty-three stories recorded here will have you both weeping and laughing, filled with despair, yet finding glimpses of hope. Don’t look for a theological treatise on ministry among the poor; don’t search for tight doctrinal discourse. Indeed, conservative evangelicals (myself included) will wince more than once at the theological ambiguity occasionally peeking through.
What readers will find is a front row introduction to a hidden world, a parallel community that very few of us know much about. It is a world that, despite the abuse, contempt and neglect it regularly experiences, nevertheless contains many who still find reasons to hang on, to hope that things might yet be better.
I will never look at the homeless with the same eyes again.
