I met the Reverend Andrew after church this past Sunday. I wasn’t trying to meet him. To be honest, I was trying my best not to meet him. But in the ebb and flow of conversation groups after the benediction, a small eddy rippled and I found myself coffee cup to coffee cup with the Reverend.

Reverend is how he introduced himself: “Reverend Andrew is who I am. Yes, that’s who I am.” The Reverend was obviously homeless: frizzy, unwashed hair and beard; torn and dirty leather jacket two sizes too small; a non-functioning 35 mm camera strung around his neck. As I tried to pass by him (it suddenly appearing very important to me that somebody put the music stands away immediately), he grabbed my arm. “Reverend Andrew is who I am. Yes, that’s who I am.”

“Welcome,” I said in my best visitor-welcoming voice. “Glad you could visit with us today.”

“I wish I had a million dollars,” he replied, without blinking an eye.

“Well, sure, I guess a lot of people probably do,” I said. “What would you do with it?”

“I’d feed the homeless, for sure, ‘cuz ain’t nobobdy doing that. I’m not saying I wouldn’t consume some of it myself, ‘cuz I sure ’nuff would; but I’d feed all the homeless. That’s what I’d do.”

It took me more than a moment to figure out how to respond to that. One doesn’t expect a homeless person to be fund raising for his own personal feed-the-homeless crusade.

“Well, you may not know that members of our church feed the homeless on Rittenhouse Square every Friday night.” That’s it; the good old “my church is doing it, so I’m covered” rejoinder.

The Reverend’s eyebrow shot up. “Really? I didn’t know that. Uh huh, now I’m sure. This church is perfect. First perfect one I’ve ever been in. But I’ll find the defect, yes I will. I always find the defect. I’m a defect detective. Ha ha! I like that. Defect detective. That’s what I am.”

Just about anyone would be stuck for where to take a conversation like this. It’s pretty obvious the usual “What do you do for a living?” or “Do you have any children” tacks aren’t going to lead anywhere. Luckily, as a Christian I can always fall back on Jesus Talk. Whenever I get nervous in a situation like this, I get this urgent squawk from the back of my head somewhere: “Minister to him! Have you ministered to him yet? Have you witnessed to him?”

“Um, well, yes…we all have the defect of sin, don’t we? That’s why we need Jesus…and, um, the grace of God.”

The Reverend Andrew looked at me like I’d just inexplicably recited the Gettysburg Address. “Of course. That’s true, of course. Now, are you ready for World War III?”

After I graduated from high school, instead of going to college I joined up with an inner-city ministry slash “Bible school” in St. Louis. It was the days of the ’70s Jesus Movement. We were all sure Jesus was going to come back before we ever saw the ’80s (and musically at least, that would’ve been a good thing). My friends and I had this urgent sense that our lives needed to be about getting as many people saved before the rapture as we could, so for me there was no time to think about college and career. Within a few months of arriving at the ministry I was put in charge of the conversion and discipling of the entire 63104 zip code of St. Louis. I was 18 years old, so I fully believed the task accomplishable. So each afternoon, after a morning of Bible classes taught by a more mature believer (he was 19), I would hit the streets around Lafayette Square, armed only with a paperback copy of The Way (”The Living Bible for Today’s Youth”) and a stack of the ministry’s evangelistic newspapers.

One afternoon I knocked on the battered steel door of an apartment four flights up a trash-strewn stairwell. When the door opened there appeared to be no one there, but then I looked down, and there was Don the Vet. Don was huddled over in a battered wheel chair, his obviously-useless legs askew beneath him. He waved me in to his flat as if he were expecting me. I’d barely crossed the threshold before he started talking.

Don the Vet, I soon learned, was only a few years older than me, though he looked like he was in his forties. A Viet Cong land mine had placed him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He spent almost all his time now alone in this fourth floor walkup with his sister bringing him groceries once a week. He noticed the Bible in my hand and informed me that he wasn’t into “God stuff,” so I shouldn’t try to convert him. Then for the next two hours he went on a monologue of bitterness and regret. I heard about every wrong ever done to him, from childhood through Nam on to his present isolation. It was overwhelming…more than that, it was suffocating. For the two hours I mostly sat nodding my head, trying to keep my hands from touching the dead cockroach bodies lying on all the furniture around me. Finally, I somehow made it clear that I needed to be moving on, people would be expecting me back at the ministry building. I backed out the door and shut it behind me, but I could still hear Don continuing right on with his bitter soliloquy.

A few days later I got a phone call from his sister, who tracked me down through the number on the ministry tract I’d left behind. She wanted to thank me for spending time with her brother. She said it had meant a lot to him, and that he’d been referring to me as “his good friend Mark” ever since. If it wasn’t too much trouble, could I look in on Don every now and then? She’d really appreciate it. I told her it would be my delight, as a servant of Christ I was called to love the weak and downtrodden of the world. Besides, I thought after I’d hung up the phone, I hadn’t really been able to witness to Don yet. I was sure that once he’d heard the “good news” he would leave all his rancor behind. I even had a little daydream in which I presented him before my ministry team leader. In the fantasy, Don was clean-shaven and smiling, tears of joy streaming down his face as he testified how the faithful loving care and persistent witness of Mark had made him realize the goodness of Jesus. Sometimes, in the daydream, he even got up out of his wheelchair after I laid hands on him and prayed.

So for a few weeks I made regular stops to see Don the Vet. I was always determined to “get in the gospel,” but even when I did Don went on with his stories of disappointment and heartbreak as if I hadn’t said a word. After a few visits, I’d heard all the stories and was well into repeat season. My visits grew further and further apart, and finally I just stopped going. Don was depressing, he was boring, and I was sure there were more “fruitful” ways to spend my time.

A couple of months went by. One day I passed by Don’s apartment building and felt a twinge of guilt about neglecting him. When I got back to the ministry headquarters, I looked up his sister’s number and gave her a call.

She told me Don wasn’t around anymore. “Oh, has he moved?” I asked.

“No, he committed suicide about a month ago. The last time I talked to him, before he did it, he asked about you, where you’d been. He asked about you a lot.”

I haven’t thought about Don the Vet in years. It’s not a pleasant memory. But it came back to me in a rush as I was desperately trying to break off my bizarre conversation with The Reverend Andrew. I realized that not much had changed in thirty years. When confronted by a person like this, my impulse was to try to “give him the gospel” and get away. I’m sure that at least in some small part of my motivation there was genuine concern for the spiritual well-being of Don and Andrew, but I’m all too aware that my overriding goal was to just make them shut up. I couldn’t deal with that much reality, with people who wear their battered souls in front of you, as visible as the stained army jackets on their backs. And if they aren’t hearing the “gospel message” I’m so uncomfortably trying to force on them, what do I have to give them? What can I do for such a person?

Don’s sister’s voice on the telephone comes back again across three decades: “I think having someone just listen to him was his lifeline. I know you tried. Thanks. Sorry for the bad news.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 11:04 am and is filed under Christian Community, It`s All About Me, Tell Me a Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.