My photo shoot for the music project was a little over a week ago. We chose a location in downtown Birmingham that most people avoid…the homes of the homeless.

Amidst office buildings and loft apartments is a trench where the above bed stands. Graffiti brightens the dirty walls with a myriad of colors and words of hope. Broken glass and trash litters the ground beneath our feet.

And I wonder…

Why? What circumstances, what choices led them to this?

And I think, in answer to my own questions…

Wounded and abandoned hearts.

I don’t know of a single child whose ambition in life is to end up homeless. So I wonder again what happened in the hearts of these people that cause them to exist in such dire situations.

The symptoms of wounded and abandoned hearts display themselves differently in different people. For the homeless, it’s living in the shadows of what most of us call normal life. They’ve landed in desperation while most of us just live on the edge of it.

I silently hope for the courage to look beyond circumstances to hearts, and to share Love and Grace and Restoration…because no matter where we lay our heads each night, we all need healed hearts. We all need to be captured by Love that sets us free.

Photo by Synergy Photography