Never Safe To Assume

I don't know his name, but there are dozens like him around the city. Night falls and he starts work at the traffic light with gasoline in a 1 liter coke bottle. Match in hand he pours some gasoline into his mouth, lights the match and blows, sending out a flame like a fire breathing dragon. This is repeated three or four times before he weaves between cars collecting change. I wonder if he uses the money for drugs, if cancer is forming in his mouth and if someday there will be a horrible accident. As he approaches my van I smell the fumes, see the red cheeks and his distant gaze. I have a few short seconds to do something....if I'm going to do anything at all. I hand him $3 pesos (25 cents), a coin inscribed with John 3:16, and a gospel tract. "Do you have hope? This is hope!” I say. The light turns and I drive off into the night……..assuming the worst.

Of course all my assumptions could be wrong about this guy. As I recall when I first met Carlos washing windows at the traffic light, I assumed that he was trying to make some extra pesos to have a few beers with his friends. To my embarrassment I learned later he was working to support his wife and one year old daughter whom we met a few months later.

Then too I am reminded of this assumption danger from Phil Yancey in his book, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference. In it he writes of an encounter he and his wife had in Nepal:

“I have seen evidence of God’s presence in the most unexpected places. During our trip to Nepal, a physical therapist gave my wife and me a tour of the Green Pastures Hospital, which specializes in leprosy rehabilitation. As we walked along an outdoor corridor, I noticed in a courtyard one of the ugliest human beings I have ever seen. Her hands were bandaged in gauze, she had deformed stumps where most people have feet, and her face showed the worst ravages of that cruel disease. Her nose had shrunken away so that, looking at her, I could see into her sinus cavity. Her eyes, mottled and cover with callus, let in no light; she was totally blind. Scars covered patches of skin on her arms.

“We toured a unit of the hospital and returned along the same corridor. In the meantime this creature had crawled across the courtyard to the very edge of the walkway, pulling herself along the ground by planting her elbows and dragging her body like a wounded animal. I’m ashamed to say my first thought was, She’s a beggar and she wants money. My wife, who has worked among the down-and-out, had a much more holy reaction. Without hesitation she bent down to the woman and put her arm around her. The old woman rested her head against Janet’s shoulder and began singing a song in Nepali, a tune that we all instantly recognized: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.’

“‘Dahnmaya is one of our most devoted church members,’ the physical therapist later told us. ‘Most patients are Hindus, but we have a little Christian chapel here, and Dahnmaya comes every time the door opens. She’s a prayer warrior. She loves to greet and welcome every visitor who comes to Green Pastures, and no doubt she heard us talking as we walked along the corridor.’

“A few months later we heard that Dahnmaya had died. Close to my desk I keep a photo that I snapped just as she was singing to Janet. Whenever I feel polluted by the beauty-obsessed celebrity culture we live in – a culture in which people pay exorbitant sums…to achieve some impossible ideal of beauty while nine thousand people die each day from AIDS for lack of treatment and hospitals like Green Pastures scrape by on charity crumbs – I pull out that photo. I see two beautiful women: my wife, smiling sweetly, wearing a brightly colored Nepali outfit she had bought the day before, holding in her arms an old crone who would flunk any beauty test ever devised except the one that matters most. Out of that deformed, hollow shell of a body, the light of God’s presence shines out. The Holy Spirit found a home.”