This Very Day

He got off the bus overwhelmed by what he saw. Buildings that shot through the clouds and city streets five layers deep. I took him a moment to get oriented to the new surroundings. After an hour my ride showed up and he headed to where he’d spend the next several weeks. To call it a church would be an understatement, to call it a mission would totally be inadequate.

But here is where he would live and work for the next few months unlearning everything he had ever learned. He spent days exploring the city in a pick up and delivery truck. Pick up and deliver used furniture for the store that supported the mission. He worked in the kitchen washing dishes and helping prepare meals for members of the mission and guests. The name for the homeless and less fortunate that wondered in for food and help.

It was literally a self-sustained city within a city. That provided services like laundry, food, medical services, and even elderly care. All tucked away in the middle of a city of millions of souls. Away from the downtown, the city wasn’t most different than where he grew up. With parks and trees and brownstone apartments and homes. But stuck between the cracks of the city were the unclean. The homeless, the drug addicts, the unwanted.

He learned a lot about life while he was there. He learned that the things he complained about were somehow far less important. And that the whole idea of faith he had been taught was bullshit.

“I had no shoes and complained, until I met a man who had no feet.”

So what is love if you keep it? What is charity if given to build yourself? I learned a lot in the hot summer of 1987. A lesson I carry to this very day. 

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