Unfortunately once I hit 39th Street my stomach pain started.
By 40th Street I declined my dinner invitation.
At 41st Street I was walking at a snail's pace and holding on tight to the fences.
When I hit 42nd Street I collapsed.
There was no one around and nowhere to go, so I crawled over to a porch at the human services building and laid there looking across the street at the shelter where we have volunteered on several occasions, but with no way to get there.
At this point people started to walk by, but if you've experienced any of my waves of sickness, I can't project my voice when I don't feel well (and I'll spare you the details of what might happen if I were to try). I couldn't call out loudly enough to people for anyone to stop. Some people looked at me, but most walked by, including the human service workers who were coming and going from work.
Finally this one rather destitute woman approached me and asked if I was ok.
I shook my head and started to cry.
Then she asked me if I need a dollar.
I was a little appalled and again said no, so she shrugged and walked away.
This woman was the only person who addressed me while I laid on that porch looking miserable. In that moment I was reminded of my last interaction with a homeless person several days earlier. This woman named Donna approached me on the street near Penn asking for a bus token. Fortunately I had just purchased another round of tokens and was able to give her as many as she needed. During my interaction with this woman, what came to mind and what I needed to share with her was this: "God provides, especially when we're at our most desperate."
Laying on the street not only did those words speak to me in a totally new way, but I was struck by the people God uses to do the providing. If I'm to be embarrassingly honest, I rarely give anything to the homeless people I see regularly. In fact, like most people around here, I often pretend I don't hear them asking and walk away while avoiding eye contact at all costs. (I would like to point out that I also do that to any person holding what appears to be a petition). What moved me to give Donna those tokens that day was most of all the Holy Spirit, but a little bit of it was the fact that I was myself in the middle of crisis mode and at my absolute whit's end and for one of the first times in my life I could truly see myself in this woman's actual shoes. For the first time in my life it didn't seem absurd that I too might find myself completely out of options and trying to navigate my own way through the shelter system and making steps toward public assistance.
What struck me about the only woman who stopped for me on the street was that she didn't have anything to offer me, but she offered because she knew what it was to be where I sat. She looked at me and she saw me and she knew me and she extended her hand. I bet...scratch that...I know that that's how Jesus looked at people. He looks at us like he really sees us and he really knows what it is to sit where we sit, and I think that's what made him so effective at drawing others to himself.
After that, I hope from here forward that I choose to be like the good Samaritan, not because I'm a good person, but because I know what it is to be out of options and how beautiful it is to look into the eyes of someone who knows.
