Don’t you just love it when God taps you on the shoulder? It doesn’t happen everyday, and I can never predict it, but I’ve come to love it when it happens. Today He stopped by for a visit. Just a little reminder, “I am always with you.”
Today was supposed to be dedicated to reading. I had scheduled fourteen hours of reading today. My stack of books is getting oppressively large and I need to log some serious hours reading, so today was the day. It started off great, 8:00 am and I’ve got a book in my lap. Within minutes my towering stack of books was one chapter shorter. Just as I put chapter two in the crosshairs, the phone rings and a guy who recently visited the church was on the other end. I’d offered him some handyman work and he wanted to know if he could come by this morning and get started. A couple of hours later he was finished and gone, though I had to force him to take some money for his labor. My plan was to pay him forty-five dollars for the two hour job, but he would only take twenty, objecting, “Minimum wage is only $8.25 an hour so this twenty would make it ten dollars an hour.” He wouldn’t take more than an honest days pay for an honest days work. That extra twenty-five dollars would come in handy very soon.
In the process of this two hour break I had inadvertently shifted from reading mode to working mode. I’ve been working since before I was a teenager, and I have done my share of digging ditches and picking up trash. Though I’ve never done it for a living, I’ve roofed, fenced, hauled hay, and built mobile homes. These days I do more working with my brain than my back, but I still know how, and still enjoy manual labor every now and then. Office work certainly has it’s perks, but there are also occupational hazards, one of which is you tend to get “soft.” Pillsbury doughboy soft if you’re not careful. Apparently I’ve been about as careful as Evel Knieval. An hour of digging, pulling, dragging, and struggling left me sucking wind and seeing stars. Briars had scratched me like a feral cat, bugs were feasting on my flesh, and I’d learned a bush in the hand is worth two ibuprofen. Just as I was ready to wave the white flag, I heard someone yelling “Who Dat!”
For the sake of the uninformed heathens who are not Saints, allow me to explain something for clarity. My favorite pro football team is the New Orleans Saints, and their battle cry is “Who Dat!” — think: Go Big Orange, War Eagle, Hotty Toddy, or better yet, Roll Tide! Saints fans are called “Who Dat’s.” The phrase comes from a chant/song, which says, “Who Dat? Who Dat? Who Dat sey dey gonna beat dem Saints?” When Saints fans see one another it is socially acceptable to loudly yell “Who Dat!”
Back to the lecture at hand. While working today I was wearing my Saints hat and I also have a Saints logo on the front tag of my car. I’m exhausted, sweaty, filthy, bleeding, defeated, and wishing my boys still lived at home. Just as I’m ready to surrender I hear someone yelling “Who Dat!” In North Central Florida I hear a lot of “Go Gators!” a few “Go ‘Noles!” and after last year’s playoff run I’m actually hearing a “Go Jags!” every now and again, but “Who Dat!” is unheard of. My initial fear was that I was in the midst of a hallucinogenic heat stroke, or that the lack of oxygen reaching my brain was producing delirium. I maneuvered myself out from behind the bush to see a man walking into my yard with a gas can in his hand, a smile on his face, and one shirt sleeve lifted up to reveal a bicep tattoo of a fleur de lis surrounded by the words “Who Dat” and “Saints.” I’m not sure who was more happy to see whom.
We laughed for a minute and talked about the Saints, and he explained that he was born in Mississippi and raised in Louisiana, to which I replied that my wife was born in Mississippi and that Louisiana was our adopted home. Over the next couple of hours I would learn his name was Leonard and he was having a bad day. While I’d been battling bushes he’d been beaten by bad breaks. Leonard recently learned his wife of twenty-three years was cheating on him and he’d made the decision to head back to Louisiana. I’ve known more guys like Leonard than I can recall. Like the guy who helped me this morning, Leonard was lean, sinewy, but muscular. He had a mouthful of bad teeth and a past full of bad decisions. Leonard was tattooed and scarred. Guys like this are tough — survivors. The kind of guy that is best described as “a working man.” I’ve worked with tons of these guys, and I’m kin to a bunch more. Their lives are littered with regrets but they “ain’t afraid to work” and will give you the shirt off their back.
Working with a church, I suspect I get to spend more time with the folks who live on the fringes of society than the average man does, and I’m pretty good at discerning what kind of person I’m dealing with. Though they tend to get lumped together, people who survive on scraps, begging for the crumbs from the rich man’s table, are as diverse as any other socio-economic group. A lot of the people I meet are mentally ill, and without an amazing, patient support system, they simply cannot function in traditional society. Quite a few of the people who ask for help are addicts of various vices. As a man with two oppressive addictions under my belt, and a third “socially acceptable” one I’m presently waging war with (food), I don’t judge. There, but for the grace of God, go I. Some of these folks aren’t mentally ill, but they are simple minded, be it because of a lack of education, parental neglect, or mental disabilities. Occasionally you get the lazy person who just doesn’t want to do anything and wants everyone else to take care of them. You get those, but they are in the minority. Mostly you get people who don’t want charity, or a hand out, they want to work for what they get. I had no doubt Leonard wanted to work for what he needed. He explained to me that he was living out of his van and working his way back to Louisiana and wanted to know if there was anything I would be willing to hire him to do.
Leonard came to be standing in my front yard through a series of providential events. His van had run out of gas about a mile from my house, so he grabbed a one gallon gas can and started walking into the first neighborhood he came across. His plan was to go door to door asking if he could do any work for anyone in exchange for some gas money. The first house he came to was mine and as he approached he witnessed me struggling with these bushes which were obviously winning the battle. Nearing my yard he first saw the Saints tag, and then my Saints hat, and excitedly yelled “Who Dat!” He told me his story and asked if I needed any help. I don’t know which of us was more thankful to get help. We got the bushes out of the ground and piled up near the street and then went to fill his gas can. As we fill the can we are talking and he tells me that he knew he was getting low on gas, so he got off the interstate to see if he could make some gas money in town, having nowhere near enough to reach his destination. In fact, he was practically empty when he took the Lake City exit. He had stopped at the church next door to the gas station and asked if there was any work he could do for gas money. The secretary told him no, but offered to contact one of the deacons who oversees the benevolence program. Their protocol is to give people food if they need it, counseling from the minister if they want it, and connect them with one of the deacons if they have needs that exceed this. She explained that the minister wasn’t in the office, and the deacon responsible for benevolence worked during the day, and wouldn’t be available until this evening. Leonard didn’t want to just wait around all day, so he set out in search of other opportunities to make some gas money. In the process of searching he ran out of gas and then ran into me.
By this time we had gotten back to his van, which was sitting in the parking lot of a popular sandwich shop called Skip’s Deli. I suggested we go in and get some lunch and it was during this time that I learned all the details of his ordeal. When he finished his story I smiled as big as a Cheshire Cat. Confused by my grin, he asked what was so funny, to which I replied, “I’m the minister at that church.” He now looked like what I imagine I looked like when he walked into my yard — about to fall over. He made quite the scene with the packed, lunch hour crowd at Skip’s when he shouted, “Are you serious?!? You are the minister at that church? And I just walked up on you and saw you’re Saints stuff? Wow! I think somebody is trying to tell me something”, he said while looking up. We finished up at Skip’s and he came back to my house and wanted to know if there was anything else I needed help with. I assured him that I appreciated his offer, but this preacher had gotten soft in the days since he was last known as a working man, and was ready to hit the showers. We went back to the gas station and I filled his tank up, then on to the church building and loaded him up with food. I kept trying to give him more food and he kept putting it back, not wanting to take too much. Leonard had a box of Vienna sausages and crackers that someone had given him, and he tried his best to give me half of them for the pantry. He’d already given some of them to a few homeless guys he’d run across in town, and wanted to leave some with us too. The guy getting food from our pantry wanted to donate food to our pantry. As he got in the car I gave him the twenty-five dollars I had in my wallet, left from when the other guy refused to take more than twenty dollars. We took a picture together showing his “Who Dat” tattoo and my Saints hat. He took my business card, and a Bible tract and promised if he ever passed through again he’d give me a call. As he got into his van he laughed and shook his head, looking up to the sky. Apparently Steve Martin was right in the movie The Jerk when he said, “The Lord loves a working man.”
This type of thing happens all the time. I can’t ever predict it, but I’ve come to expect it, and I always enjoy it. Sometimes it makes me laugh, sometimes it makes me cry, sometimes it makes me worship. It always makes me grateful. For years I didn’t know what to call it, or even how to explain and describe it, but awhile back my buddy Jode turned me on to an expression they use in his family. “It’s just a God thing.” The first time I heard that I loved it. It just seemed like the perfect way to capture the event, the emotion, and the atmosphere of such a thing. Leonard and I agreed, this was just a God thing. For him it was a reminder that even though his world seemed to be falling apart, he wasn’t on this journey alone. For me it was a reminder that God is always right on time. And that He’s obviously a Saints fan.
No comments:
Post a Comment