KEEPING UP WITH GOD - Book Review

Keeping Up With God by Donnetta Wilhelm and Connie Zimmerman is a memoir about Connie Zimmerman’s journey in creating a nonprofit called RB Ranch that did business as Colorado Homeless Families. This organization provided homes and ultimately a future to those they helped. Connie Zimmerman depicts her accomplishments as all of God’s doings, and that may be true, but Connie Zimmerman certainly needs to be lauded for her ingenuity and perseverance in her quest to help the homeless.

One important thing you’ll learn from Zimmerman’s memoir is that anyone can become homeless. Wilhelm narrates a litany of stories of real people losing their jobs, their homes, and their hope. Once you have exhausted all your funds getting up – finding a home again is an arduous task and even more so if you have a family. Keeping Up With God will make you rethink what it means to be the people of God and how we should go about loving and serving our neighbors in need. If your heart breaks every time you walk by someone sleeping on the sidewalk, this book will give you a better understanding of what that person has gone through. Zimmerman worked at giving the homeless hope and gave them a way to end their plight with a bit of dignity. This book confronts and upends so many of the assumptions, and preconceived judgments society holds about homelessness and the people who are so unfortunate to experience it. Zimmerman’s creatively solving the housing problem for so many shows how biblical attentiveness and Christian faith can heal the profound dislocations in our society.

Wilhelm writes that Zimmerman had a powerful theological vision that called upon her to lead the desperate, the homeless to shelter and a new beginning. Zimmerman’s response to this calling was remarkable and breathed love and new life into the desperate situations of those she helped – it was a grace-filled response for the displaced Colorado Homeless Families.

Keeping Up With God goes far beyond covering the subject of homelessness as the social problem we all recognize in our cities. Zimmerman provides a blueprint of how other organizations could help solve the homelessness problem. It is a book of solutions for the many communities that need housing. Socioeconomic, ecological, and psycho-spiritual issues plus impotent government policies provide little relief for the homeless problem. In fact, many of the government’s policies actually hurt the poor or create more obstacles to obtaining gainful employment.

The stigma associated with homelessness creates a situation that prevents many of the homeless from reaching out to their community and asking for help. The experience of homelessness can never truly be understood unless you have lived it, but Zimmerman felt the calling to help those who were homeless. Her work has sent ripples of hope across the networks dedicated to bringing the homeless back into society as productive citizens.

Zimmerman appears to live by Proverbs 28:27, “Those who give to the poor will lack nothing, but those who close their eyes to them receive many curses.”  Readers of Keeping Up With God will come away informed and encouraged to support real solutions within their community.