I have a friend who’s been looking for an apartment. So when we heard about one available for only $250 a month all utilities included, we went to see it. If you’re thinking $250 a month rent is too good to be true, you’re right.

We got there at 9:30 p.m. The landlord wasn’t there yet, so we waited in the hallway inside the front door of the house-turned-apartment building. To steal the words of the landlord, the building wasn’t exactly the Taj Mahal, but my friend and I still had high hopes for the apartment. A loud dog barking behind door number three almost sent pee down my leg. Then the door opened.

“What the **** are you doing here?" asked the creepy man who came out.

“We’re meeting the landlord to see an apartment,” we responded.

He seemed satisfied with that response. It wasn’t until he reached forward to shake my hand that I noticed the large knife in a holster around his waste. “I never leave home without it,” he said when we asked him about it.

The landlord and his wife finally arrived and took us up the stairs to apartment five. When he put the key in the doorknob, a cockroach fell from the top of the doorframe and landed on his hand. He shook it off like it was nothing and opened the door.

I had never seen anything like it. Live roaches were running around all over the floors and walls. Everything was filthy: the walls, the furniture the previous tenant had left behind, the kitchen appliances, counters, and floor. Something smelled like it had been rotting for months.

The bathroom was the worst of all. The shower walls were stained orangish-brown. Roaches were floating in the toilet. A large handful of black hair was piled in the corner of the shower.

The whole time we were talking to the landlord, his wife was running around with a can of Raid, spraying the roaches and shouting things like, “I think we’re really making headway here!” What she didn’t realize is that for every one roach she killed, there were hundreds more behind the walls and under the floors. When she sprayed along the threshold between the carpeted hallway and the wood-floor living room, about 50 roaches came running out from under the carpet.

When my friend and I got outside, we looked at each other, expressed how grossed out we both were through noises and a little dance like we were trying to shake off the filth, and ran to the car. I wanted to take a shower. I thought I felt roaches crawling on me, and I knew my clothes smelled like rotten chicken.

It wasn’t until later that I thought about the reality of what we had just seen. People actually live like that. There are people who have to choose between sharing their apartment with cockroaches and having enough food to eat. And here I am, likely to complain when I run out of milk for my cereal in the morning or when the Internet in my house stops working for 10 minutes. It’s a sobering thought as we approach the Thanksgiving feast next week and a good reminder of how much we have to be thankful for.

Psalm 107:1