He was one of those people you don't forget once you meet him.
I heard his voice before I really noticed anything else.
It was rough and gravelly, the kind of voice that sounded like life had worn against it for years.
But underneath the gruffness was something gentle.
He spoke carefully.
Kindly.
And most days, he carried a tiny puppy tucked inside his coat.
You wouldn't always see her at first.
Every now and then, a little nose would poke out between the folds of his jacket before
disappearing again into the warmth of his chest.
He protected that little dog like she was all he had left in the world.
And maybe she was.
His wife had died less than three months before I met him.
He talked about her often.
It didn't take long to realize how much of his life had disappeared when she did.
Some people lose a spouse and lose the person they love.
Others lose the person who helped hold their whole world together.
He seemed to be grieving both.
When we first met, he was living out of an old truck.
It wasn't much, but it gave him somewhere to sleep. Somewhere to keep the few things he had.
Somewhere that little puppy could curl up beside him at night.
Then the truck broke down.
And when it did, he walked away from it.
No tow truck.
No repairs.
No backup plan.
He simply gathered what he could carry and kept going.
That's how quickly the little stability he had disappeared.
Then one afternoon, I got a call about a blind woman who had been abandoned outside of town.
By the time we finally got her to the shelter, she was terrified.
She couldn't see her surroundings.
She didn't know the building.
She didn't know where anything was.
She was completely dependent on other people to help her navigate a place she'd never been.
And then something happened that I haven't forgotten.
The man with the puppy began taking care of her.
The man who barely had anything himself.
The man whose wife had just died.
The man whose truck had broken down.
The man who didn't have a home.
He noticed her.
He would let her hook her arm through his and slowly guide her through the building.
“There's a step here.”
“Doorway.”
“Watch your foot.”
At mealtime, he'd fix her plate before he fixed his own.
Then he'd carefully put it in front of her so she wouldn't have to reach around trying to find it.
Nobody assigned him that job.
Nobody asked him to do it.
He just did.
I remember watching him and thinking about how badly we misunderstand people.
Someone could have walked into that shelter, looked at him, and immediately decided what they
were seeing.
A homeless man.
A grieving man.
A man with nowhere to go.
A man who needed help.
And all of those things would have been true.
But they wouldn't have been the whole truth.
Because I was watching a gentleman.
I was watching someone whose own life was falling apart make sure another person didn't have
to be afraid.
He needed help.
And he was helping.
Both things were true at the same time.
Eventually, he stopped coming around as much.
That happens in this work.
People disappear.
Sometimes they find another place to go.
Sometimes they enter a program.
Sometimes they relapse.
Sometimes they move.
And sometimes you simply don't know.
You learn to live with unfinished stories.
For a while, his was one of them.
Then one day, I heard a familiar voice.
That gravelly voice.
I turned the corner expecting to see the man I remembered.
But the person standing there looked different.
Healthier.
Steadier.
There was life in him again.
He had entered a program and was close to graduating.
And that wasn't all.
They had offered him a job.
They had also offered him a place to stay onsite afterward.
He had somewhere to go.
Something to do.
A future.
I can still remember the look on his face when he told me.
Hope looks different when you've seen someone without it.
He hugged me that day.
And I mean hugged me.
We both cried.
He talked about everything he had survived.
Everything he had lost.
Everything God had carried him through.
And over and over he kept saying,
“God sent me to the Ministry Center.”
“You guys saved my life.”
I understood what he meant.
But I've thought about those words many times since.
Because I'm not sure the helping went only one direction.
He changed us too.
Takeaway
One of the easiest mistakes to make in ministry is assuming we know who the helper is.
We think it's us.
We're the ones with the food.
The resources.
The office.
The phone numbers.
The connections.
The programs.
So naturally, we must be the helpers.
And the person walking through the door must be the one who needs helping.
Then somebody like the man with the puppy comes along and messes up all those categories.
Because yes, he needed help.
He was grieving.
Homeless.
His transportation was gone.
His life had come apart.
But then a blind woman arrived who was frightened and vulnerable, and he saw her.
Before himself.
He guided her through the building.
He fixed her food.
He helped her navigate unfamiliar spaces.
He became safety for someone else while he was still looking for safety himself.
I'll never forget that.
Because it taught me something I desperately needed to learn:
Need does not erase what a person has to give.
We sometimes look at people in crisis and see only what is missing.
No home.
No job.
No transportation.
No money.
No stability.
But human beings are not lists of deficits.
A person can need help and still be helpful.
A person can be grieving and still comfort someone else.
A person can be homeless and still be a gentleman.
A person can have almost nothing and still be generous with what remains.
Sometimes what remains is kindness.
Sometimes patience.
Sometimes strength.
Sometimes it's simply an arm for a frightened woman to hold onto while she walks down a
hallway she cannot see.
That matters.
I've learned that ministry gets unhealthy when we always place ourselves above the people
we're serving.
When we're always the giver and they're always the receiver.
That's not relationship.
And it's certainly not the way I've experienced this work.
The people who have walked through our doors have taught me.
Prayed for me.
Made me laugh.
Frustrated me.
Changed my mind.
Challenged my faith.
Shown me generosity.
And sometimes they've demonstrated the love of Jesus better than I did.
The man with the puppy did that.
He didn't have to preach a sermon.
He fixed a woman's plate.
He gave her his arm.
He told her where the steps were.
Sometimes that's what love looks like.
Then, sometime later, I got to see another side of his story.
He came back.
Healthy.
Working toward graduation from a program.
Offered a job.
Offered a place to live.
Hopeful.
I love that part of the story.
But I don't want his eventual success to become the thing that proves he was valuable all along.
He didn't become worthy when he got healthy.
He didn't become worthy when somebody offered him a job.
He didn't become worthy when housing became possible.
He was worthy when he was living in the truck.
He was worthy when the truck broke down.
He was worthy when everything he owned could be carried with him.
His restoration didn't create his dignity.
It simply gave the rest of us another opportunity to see what had been there all along.
I think that's one reason God has used this work to change me so much.
I entered ministry thinking I would spend my life helping people.
I didn't understand how many of those people would help shape me.
The line between “us” and “them” gets awfully thin when you actually know people's names and
stories.
Eventually, you realize there really isn't an us and a them.
There are just people.
People who sometimes need to be carried.
People who sometimes do the carrying.
And most of us, if we live long enough, will be both.
I'll always remember that gravelly voice.
I'll remember the little nose sticking out of his coat.
I'll remember him walking beside a blind woman with her arm wrapped through his.
And I'll remember what he told me when he came back:
“You guys saved my life.”
Maybe.
But that's only half the story.
He gave something back long before he had anything to give.
No comments:
Post a Comment