For Wilshire Baptist Church
Driving home past a church in our neighborhood, we stopped at a traffic light and noticed a man lying on the sidewalk. He was in the shade under the live oak trees, face up, with his feet hanging off the edge of the curb. As we stared, we wondered out loud what was up and what we should do, but that was mostly a rhetorical exercise because we knew what we should do.
The man was lying near the exit of the church parking lot, so I made a U-turn and went back to the entrance and drove in. We rolled slowly to near where he was lying and parked, looking to see if his chest was moving up and down with his breath. We couldn’t see any motion, and with some apprehension we got out and walked slowly over to him. “Are you OK?” we asked, and there was no answer, so we asked again. To our relief, one eye fluttered open and then he raised a hand and motioned as if to say, “Yes,” but also to say, “Leave me alone.”
About that time, a man walked up behind us from the church and told us the man on the ground had been on the other side of the building but had moved to where he was now. “We’ve been watching him. I think he’s probably just getting over something,” he said. We understood “something” to mean alcohol or drugs, but I wondered later if maybe he was just exhausted from another long day on the street. The church man thanked us, and knowing the man on the ground was being watched, we drove the short distance home.
Thinking back on the scenario, there’s no doubt our instinct to stop and check was influenced to some degree by the Biblical story of “the Good Samaritan,” a story we both grew up with that is layered with lessons about how we should treat our neighbors, starting with the hard question: Who is our neighbor?
It’s a story LeAnn recently taught the children in her pre-K Sunday school class. Using a new-to-Wilshire curriculum called Godly Play, LeAnn told the story with small wooden characters to show how two men walked past a man who had been beaten by thieves and left for dead, but then another man from Samaria stopped to help him. The children caught on quickly, because as each man “passed by on the other side,” the children said without prompting, “He’s mean.” They also were challenged with questions about who in the story was a neighbor to who, including who was a neighbor to the thieves and the two men who passed by? The children didn’t have answers, and I dare say many of us struggle with that too.
Here in the 21st century, there’s a new character in our own stories: technology. As I think back on it, I know there might have been security cameras watching the man on the ground and watching our response. Often on the TV news and social media we see cases where an accident or crime is caught on camera, and not only are the victims and perpetrators recorded, but so are the heroes who come to the rescue and the folks who stop, look and move on. Sometimes they are one and the same; a motorist strikes a pedestrian with his vehicle, gets out to look, and then drives away. It’s interesting how our reaction may be, “Didn’t they know they were being watched?” But how often do we forget that God is always watching.
I’m glad we stopped this time, but there have been plenty of times when I rolled on. Usually, it’s at an intersection where someone is standing in the median with a sign and a cup and the look of hunger and desperation on their face. Sometimes I give myself a pass and replay in my head the advice I’ve received from police at Crime Watch meetings: Don’t enable panhandlers by giving in to their pressure. Other times I sit at a traffic light, tapping my foot impatiently on the floorboards in a sort of nervous prayer that the light will change before the man or woman walks down to my car.
And then sometimes I’m just plain busted. Like the time this past December when I stopped at an intersection and noticed people at every corner holding signs. I ignored them until I felt movement and turned to find a woman standing at my window. She was holding a sign explaining they were raising money for the burial of a child who had a name and an age. Feeling trapped, I lowered the window and handed her a few dollars.
When the light changed and I started across the intersection, the ugly irony of the moment hit hard: I was driving to Restland to put a Christmas wreath on my father’s grave.