I was out for a walk today and a man stopped me on the sidewalk. He asked if I could buy him lunch. I pulled some cash out of my wallet and handed it to him.
That should have been the whole story. I’ve had that exchange more times than I can count. Somebody asks, I give or I don’t, we both keep walking, and I’ve forgotten it by the next block.
The question I hadn’t heard before
He thanked me. Then he asked a second question, one I had never heard before. Would it be alright if he kept this money and asked more people for help?
He didn’t have to say that. The cash was already in his hand. He could have thanked me, waited for me to turn the corner, and gone right back to work. Instead he stopped and asked a stranger’s permission to do something that stranger would never have known about.
It is not what I would have done in his place. But it was an honest ask, and I wasn’t ready for it.
What I actually gave him
I shook his hand, looked him in the eye, and told him the truth. “I gave it to you. It’s yours to do with as you will. It’s okay. God loves you. Have a good day.”
Then I walked away. Behind me he said, “Thank you. I needed that today.”
He had already thanked me for the money. What I heard this time was the release. He had been carrying some version of am I doing this right, is this allowed, and I had told him he could set it down. I could be wrong about what was in his head. I’m not wrong about what was in mine.
That is what a gift is. The moment I hand something over and still want a vote on what happens to it, it stops being a gift and becomes a loan with no paperwork. Jesus put it more bluntly than I would have: give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what is yours, don’t demand it back (Luke 6:30). I had always read that verse as being about generosity. Today it read as being about letting go.
New eyes
Here is the part I didn’t expect. I walked up to that man seeing a transaction. Lunch for cash, done. I walked away having been shown something I hadn’t filed him under: a man uncomfortable enough about asking strangers for money that he checked with one of them whether it was okay.
I didn’t decide to see him differently. I didn’t squint harder. He did something I wasn’t braced for, and the old picture couldn’t hold it.
That is how new eyes usually come, at least for me. The situation refuses to be what I filed it as. The coworker I have figured out, the passage I have read two hundred times. Something honest comes out of it sideways, and if I am paying attention, I have to redraw the picture.
