Before Christopher sat down for his interview, his priority was to help a fellow vendor. He carefully wrote down shelter information for his colleague, and only then was he ready to talk.
“I think at the most basic level, any help is really just giving information,” Christopher said.
Christopher grew up in Yuma, Ariz., where his father was a Marine and his mother was a teacher. He ran track and played baseball and football in high school.
“There, the heat is your first enemy in sports,” Christopher said. “It’s your adversary, and you sweat through it. It teaches you that your body or your mind … can adapt to hard situations. Much like out here, being on the street.
“(But) I don’t call it being on the street. About four years after college, I started to travel and I never really had too much cash. I always seemed to spend it all to get where I needed to go, so I’d find myself in places with a backpack and not a lot of cash. Some call it wanderlust.”
In the past, Christopher visited Portland several times. This time he traveled up the Oregon Coast with a pastor.
“Now it’s a little different,” Christopher said. “I came up here and stretched myself out for a different reason than just travel. Yet, it still is the same. Whether you’re traveling or for whatever reason it is, you just make do.”
Christopher parted ways with the pastor, painted houses and worked with a mission on the east side of the Willamette River. He began selling Street Roots newspapers about a month ago.
“If you’re homeless and you really don’t have a place to stay in this area,” he said, “then Street Roots can serve as a headquarters for the first two hours of your day. To help you get started. Then it’s up to you.
“In any given situation, no matter if it’s cold and raining outside and you have $5 in your pocket or you have a job, a nice car and a girlfriend and five grand in the bank – either way, both people have a set of choices. And some of those choices are destructive in your life, and some of them are evolutionary.”
Christopher said his most recent evolutionary choice was saying yes to this interview.
“I’m not doing this interview for myself. If somehow I can help out these people that I see rolling around on wheelchairs in the rain, these people who are sick and coughing in tents, and these people that are lost – if I can somehow help them, by being a voice for them, then I will,” he said.
“In a way, I’m reaching out to my middle-class family a little bit,” Christopher said. “With a call to action for (middle-class) people to experience for a short period of time what it’s like to not have, to live in a shelter, in a tent, and walk the streets … so they can learn for themselves.”
When asked about his goals, Christopher said: “I have faith that there really is a promised land. Some of us have felt it here, from heart to heart. So somehow, (my goals are) actually being able to show people the way to that place.
“I’ve experienced low levels of persecution,” he said. “And when you express your truth, sometimes it’s not accepted.
“No matter what has happened in the past, you’ve just got to keep going. You’ve got to keep shining your light. It’s been said, ‘What good is the light if you cover it up?’ So if you have a little light in you, let it shine.”