What do you see?

Here's an ordinary median in Winston-Salem. This particular one was only accompanied by a couple of street signs, but usually there is a homeless person roaming up and down the median with a "Homeless, please help. God Bless You" sign. Today I was thinking, I wonder how they got to this point? What they were thinking the first time they had to write that message on the piece of cardboard? And how it felt the first time they actually stood on the median to ask people for spare change? I gave this guy some change today as I was waiting for the light to change. To my surprise I saw something that I didn't expect, something actually kind of scary. This guy looked about in is 20s and maybe had made some wrong decisions that led him to this point. But as he took my change and said, "God Bless You" I looked into his eyes and saw absolutely no hope left. A person with no hope is a dangerous person... to themselves. So I guess my next question would be, how can we help to prevent homelessness and provide hope to the hopeless? What do you see when you look at the median?