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Good Morning. In the park near my home there is a man, lying in a ditch, using the sod for a bed and cardboard boxes for a duvet. When it rains he heads to the library to keep dry and read the papers until it closes. If he’d read the papers this week he’d have seen, amongst headlines about deadlines and red lines, that 726 homeless people died last year. The Office for National Statistics declared it the biggest increase in homeless deaths since such data was first collected. The causes of these deaths are as varied and complex as the people who lost their lives, but drug use and the loss of a safety net are being cited as key factors. The Housing Minister said “there is no shying away from these statistics;” his Shadow said the findings “shamed us all”. While the Chief Executive of Crisis said “it is heart-breaking that hundreds of people were forced to spend the last days of their lives without the dignity of a secure home.” Indeed, it is a scandal that, in one of the richest nations on earth, people die in ditches and on street corners for want of shelter, warmth and help. But it seems we still inhabit a world where, to quote the prophet, Job, the homeless ‘have nothing to cover themselves in the cold’ and ‘the cries of the dying rise from the city.’ Of course, there are people responding to these cries. Charitable organisations, care workers, churches, stitching together a patchwork of support as best they can. Where I live a charity gets churches to convert into hostels for the night and its people to cook, serve and eat food with the homeless who come. It’s basically people with homes serving people without, which is about the only difference between them. For these encounters show that behind every statistic there is a story. A person with a name, who once had a home. But whose life went awry. There are many routes to homelessness: a simple twist of fate, a redundancy, a divorce. A bout of depression. A battle with addiction. All of them situations closer to home than those with homes might like to hear. As the gospel suggests, one reason it’s uncomfortable getting close to poverty and weakness is that it lays bare our own poverty and weakness. Meanwhile, the man in the park has moved on. He has his own potentially lethal deadline to worry about. The weather is changing. You can feel the presage of colder days in the air as the mercury drops below 10. For most of us this means pulling on a jumper or popping the heating on; for him and the thousands who walk the streets without the succour of shelter, it signals the approach of more challenging questions: Will I get through this winter? And what help will I find?