This weekend America is wrapping up “Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week,” an annual recognition held the week before Thanksgiving “to draw attention to the problems of hunger and homelessness.”

As with most awareness campaigns, for many of us they don’t truly raise our consciousness until they become all too real personally. For instance, Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week will likely fly well below the radar for the vast majority of Americans.

And admittedly, up until 15 months ago, it did for me too, a pastor nonetheless.

But friends, if you put any stock in what I share each week, please believe me when I share that both hunger and homelessness are all too real in this very wealthy nation of ours. Even if tens of millions of us never see it.

Here are the sobering numbers: 37.2 million Americans live below the poverty level; 580,000 Americans are homeless on a typical night; 44 million Americans are at risk of suffering from hunger; 1 in 6 children in the U.S. live in poverty.

And yes, there are neighbors right there in your community who go hungry, are homeless and who live in poverty. These aren’t issues that only exist in some distant place other than your hometown.

These are difficult words to hear for many of us.

Isn’t America supposed to be the land of milk and honey? If these stats are true, that means neighbors I know are struggling and I don’t see it. And, if a full 13 percent of Americans are hungry, and 12 percent are poor, maybe it really does mean that our social contract is broken.

But that’s the importance of awareness weeks, right? It gives us the opportunity to lift up difficult issues so that busy people bombarded with thousands of media hits a day can be reached.

I pray you consider this such an effort.

I often say that despite being with my church for eight years, it was going to work at a faith-based nonprofit that runs an emergency shelter, a pantry and supportive housing that really taught me what the gospel is: the very act of clothing, feeding, sheltering and healing our neighbors.

Every neighbor whether we consider them worthy or not.

As faithful people, if we get nothing else that Jesus preaches in the gospels right, it ought to be caring for the “least of these” as Jesus refers to the most vulnerable.

Friends … There is likely an agency near you that cares for the unhoused. There is most certainly a food pantry. And there also may be an assortment of other organizations caring for those in poverty.

As this national “Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week” wraps up, I pray that you too see the need, honor Jesus’ words and support those who are clothing, feeding, sheltering and healing our neighbors. Amen.

— Devlyn Brooks is the CEO of Churches United in Moorhead, Minn., and an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America serving Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at devlynbrooks@gmail.com.