Hard times for couple leads to Salvation
EL DORADO — According to a 2016 US Housing and Urban Development study, 1, 564,708 people in the U.S. are homeless. Of that number, 206,286 were people in families, 358,422 were individuals and a quarter of the entire group were children.
Lieutenants Charles and Teri Smith, commanding officers of the Salvation Army in El Dorado, want people to know that being homeless can happen to anyone, including them.
Their story begins in 2010, when Charles was a pastor at a small church in Rudy, Arkansas. He felt that God was asking him to do something different and resigned from the position. Charles had been working two jobs and Teri was working one full time and two part time jobs. They were doing the best they could to make ends meet, while raising a 10 and a 12 year-old.
At the time, the family was renting to own a house in Van Buren, Arkansas. After two years of paying rent and being one month away from buying the home, they received a knock on the door. “This person proceeds to tell us that the person we’ve been paying rent money to, had not been paying their mortgages and (the home) was about to be foreclosed on,” Teri said. “For us, we were saying , ‘We don’t understand what is going on.’ That was the first we had heard about it.
“We contacted the person that we were paying rent to and ended up being in the middle of their financial battle,” she said. “Here we are thinking we’re a month away and we’re about to be able to buy this house.
“In my mind, we made it if we bought a house,” Teri said. “We finally have made it as adults, and then our dreams just kind of shattered.”
For the Smiths, it was a no win situation. Spending a lot of money on a lawyer was not an option, and the lawyer they did speak with told them they needed to pull out.
This meant they had no place to live and no where to go.
They started packing their things because they didn’t know when someone was going to show up at their door telling them to get out.
“My sister came and said she had an extra room in her house and my brother, who lived two houses down from her, had an extra room in
his house,” Teri said. Charles and Teri moved into her sister’s house, and their two children moved in to her brother’s house. Being separated was very difficult for both the parents and the children, so after a week, decided to all move in to one room at Teri’s sister’s home.
They had four mattresses on the floor, with barely any room to walk, and put the rest of their furniture in extra storage space Teri’s brother had. They then waited for what God would have them do next.
The Smith’s lived with
Teri’s sister in Van Buren for six months.
During this time, Charles applied to be a bell ringer with the Salvation Army.
“At the time, we had no idea what the Salvation did, we just saw an ad in the newspaper,” Teri said. “It was a Christian organization, but we had no idea the magnitude that the Salvation Army had.”
Charles received an interview with the organization. The officer noticed Charles had experience in ministry and asked him to be the assistant bell ringer coordinator. A few of his duties included taking people to the bell sites and counting money from the kettles
and Charles excepted the position.
The only problem with this job was that it was just temporary. The position only lasted until December 31st, and the family did not know what January 1st held, but they left it in God’s hands.
Charles’ job with the Salvation Army was not a nine to five job, and some nights he didn’t get off work until 11 p.m.
“Family life is very important to us, so I started saying ‘If you’re going, is there something we could do to help?’”, Teri said. “(Charles) said yeah, they said they’d love to have you guys come help count money with us from the kettles.”
After school, Teri and the children would go to the Salvation Army and help count money. At the same time, they found out about Salvation
Army’s church services and decided to try it out.
“The church service was very inspirational, we really clicked with the people that were there and the mission of the army, which was to meet human needs in the name of Jesus Christ,” Teri said.
The family got involved with church around October, 2010.
From there, they started volunteering more and more. The first major volunteer service they were involved with was Thanksgiving Dinner, putting food on the plates for people.
“One of the big things I wanted my kids to understand during that time was that, even though we were homeless at the time, doesn’t mean God had given up on us, ” Teri said. “Even though we were homeless, that doesn’t mean that we can’t help serve others. That’s why we went.
“From that point on, it was like you had to almost drag us away from the Salvation Army,” she added.
There was another job opening that would be full time for Charles, but it took until December 30th for them to officially offer him the position.
“Up until December 30th, we didn’t know what January 1st was going to hold for our family in an income way,” Teri said. “So it was almost like, here comes a new year, here comes a new job and a new ministry, but also here comes us involved with the Salvation Army because we became members.”
The first week of January 2011, Teri and Charles became soldiers of the Salvation Army.
Around this time, Teri was asked if she was interested in being a youth pastor. She told them she was interested in March, and was offered the job two weeks later.
At the time, she was still working at a school as a teacher, but received permission to leave everyday at 2 p.m.
and went straight to the Salvation Army.
With this new opportunity, she started finding out more and more about the Salvation Army, including the fact that women could become ordained ministers.
In the Salvation Army, if you’re a married couple, both people must become ordained ministers. At first, Charles did not want to go back to being a pastor, due to having a bad experience the year before, but after a few months he decided God was calling him. They went to training college in Atlanta, Georgia in 2013. Training college takes two years to complete.
In 2015, they were ordained officers, and were placed in El Dorado, where they have been ever since.
“El Dorado has been difficult and hard, but it has been a great experience for me,” Teri said. “My husband has pastored and preached for 25 years, but for me to finally be able to, has been a really neat experience.
“I think God put us through a lot of that so that we could go into that next ministry,” Teri said. “The big key to us was just being ready for whatever God wanted us to do.
“You can be doing everything, if you want to call it, right. It wasn’t like we weren’t working, weren’t paying bills, we just didn’t have good luck with what we expected and planned,” she said. “It put us in a place where we needed help. If we would have known about the services of the Salvation Army, then we probably would have gone and implemented those.
“But it did give us a perspective to those that we help now,” Teri said. “We understand what it’s like to be homeless. And we understand what it’s like to be homeless with a family.”
The Salvation Army offers many different programs in El Dorado from support for adults to children and families. They have utility assistance and also have a disaster service, which helps people who are victims of natural disasters.
They provide a Thanksgiving and Christmas meal every year, which serves around 300 people each. Every Christmas, they have the bell ringers and angel trees in the community to raise money.
There are church services every Sunday, with Sunday School beginning at 10 a.m. and worship at 11 a.m.
There are multiple programs including character building, senior commodities program, GED Refresher classes and much more.
They provide daily meals twice a day for lunch and dinner and also provide a shelter.
People can help volunteer their services in the Food Pantry, providing, preparing and serving an evening meal in the Murphy Red Shield diner, or volunteer at the Family Store.
The Salvation Army of El Dorado is located at 419 S. Madison Ave. Their phone number is 870-863-4830.
Kaitlyn Rigdon is a staff writer at the El Dorado News-Times and she may be reached at 870-8626611 or by email, krigdon@eldoradonews.com.