There are always going to be people who need help. Who need
love, compassion, a hug, a home, a family to belong to, someone to vent to. The
problem is that I will never be able to hold all of them, get them all jobs,
dry each one’s tears, fill each one’s belly. I can’t see how in the span of my
short life, I could align with more than a handful of needy people in
comparison to the whole world. Putting it lightly- it’s kind of a hopeless
situation.
When a friend came to see me in Spain, we were walking in
Valencia and spotted a gypsy asking for money. I walked straight past, ignorant.
Oh, the gypsies…most of them are immigrants and come to Spain and France from
North Africa and Romania where honestly there isn’t a whole lot of money to
make right? Working on the streets makes something for them to send home to
their families. You do what you have to.
But I had seen a lot of gypsies in the past 7 months that I
had been there and I had been scammed and cheated and taken advantage of by
them. I had learned to just walk past, ignoring their signs asking for money
for a starving daughter at home or a brother in the hospital. My friend said we
should give him something, and I said that we couldn’t give money to every
single gypsy in the city.
“You’re heartless,” is what my friend said and it has
resonated with me since. Not in a good way.
Because I’m not heartless! You’re not heartless! And I’m
sure there are heartless people in the world, but I think you can definitely
choose to be one or not. Lately, I have been thinking incessantly about what
God wants me to do with my life and how He wants me to introduce people to Him.
Earlier tonight, I was on the porch of Kate’s house, chatting on the phone with
my best friend Chandler. And this kid rides his bike past a couple times, and
around the third time he finally stops and goes, “Hey…are you busy?”
Yes I’m busy. I’m obviously on the phone. Who do you think
you are, kid? (By the way, I’m Heartless, nice to meet you). But he goes on, “I
just thought maybe we could talk.” I’m such a sucker for strangers. So I kind
of put the pull the phone away from my ear, totally shocked by this kid’s
insistence and his guts to interrupt the phone call of a complete stranger.
Perhaps this guy thought I was a little bit younger than I actually
am because he continued to ask me how old I was and where I went to school and
if I had a job, then realizing that I probably wasn’t the person he wanted to
marry, he sat down on the porch and asked me question after question about the
university, my job, my life, if I play sports, what I want to do with my life,
how I pay for school, if I have siblings, how my life is going…for a person who
wanted to talk, he sure asked a lot of personal questions.
Which I answered most obligingly! I told him pretty much
everything I know about Walla Walla University, studying abroad, student
missions, what classes to take, what he could major in and about all the events
he could come to this next year. “So many of the things you’ve told me about, I
have never heard of before,” is what he said to me after I stopped babbling. I
have a tendency to fill the awkward silence. So instead of stopping and letting
other people internalize and respond, I just…keep talking. I’m socially
handicapped.
He asked me if I partied a lot (since I’m old enough to buy
alcohol), and I asked him if he did. He said he kind of did, that he had been
to JD once and hated it because he got bored after the second day. I couldn’t imagine
being in a place like prison- knowing I would never be able to climb mountains
or swim in the Columbia by my house or climb in Yosemite again, or make art to
hang in the house. I said things out loud as they came into my head, “What would
you do if you couldn’t do the things you want and love to do? You have to be
careful with your life, Moises, and don’t be afraid to break away from the
things that make you feel dead. You should feel alive and passionate about what
you’ll do with your life. Because what if you get to the end of it and you look
back and wish you had done more, or loved more people, or forgave people? What
if you never took advantage of all that is in front you? What would you do?”
These are questions I ask myself, too. Perhaps I wasn’t just
talking to Moises. Maybe he was the mechanism God was using to try to get me to
face my impending future, the inevitable decisions I will make. Before Moises
left, he put my cell phone number in his phone so he would be able to contact me
about stuff going on at the university. Afterwards, I called Chandler back and
asked him if I should be giving out my number out to underage boys. Didn’t get
much of a solid response about that one.
Moises made me nervous. To the point that I almost rejected
him; almost put up a defense and told him to get lost. Because I don’t have the
resources to help every floundering child in the city.
Heartless.
God’s tendency is to blow your mind. I often hear Jesus’
voice in the back of my mind saying that I don’t just get to choose who I will help. I don’t get to
shop for the homeless people and troubled youth that seem like they need me. I
do not get to choose to who will help me, either. God just drops us off in the middle of the
pathway of all sorts of people.
And almost always I have found, they are the ones who we
will not help, but ones who will help us.
