Seeing God in the Stranger Who Sleeps in the Shadow of the Steeple.

We walk the streets of Vancouver B.C. Porches and vintage automobiles buzzing by speedily.  Dull eyes, busy feet beat the streets here in this late night, city life.  Dresses, heals, and suits in the latest fashions, stop and look at their imagine in the mirrors of the store fronts.

I sympathize.  I used to be one of them.  Dull eyed.  Looking for something…in a country just north of where we live.

But this time, I don’t know what it is.  The hollowness of it all, echoes painfully in my chest. Eyes everywhere somehow now seem different. Empty. Vacant.  Somewhere far off in a distance existence of where I used to live. Before meeting Christ.

In my late teens, early twenties….I ran willingly to this big city in Canada.  Drawn to others lost in our own kind of identity crisis. But now, decades later…everyone looks different. What once was so appealing, now all somehow seems hollow, vain, empty.

We look for a smile. Conversation. Eye contact….But find none. Husband and I keep strolling.  Observing.  Taking in….the diversity, yet sameness of it all.  

And sometimes we don’t realize how much we have changed, until we see ourselves respond in a different way, looking back in retrospect; realizing somehow by grace…we are not the same.

Sometimes God does a work, taking things away.  And we don’t even realize what we have lost….until we see it around us.  And instead of missing it…we give God praise.

Sometimes deliverance is in an instant….but most often it is through the slow, gradual, turning wheel progression of the daily “yes”…the painful work of sanctification where any true fruit, deep fruit, lasting fruit ever seems to surface.

Sometimes God changes people, and they don’t even notice until they come smack
dab face to face with the reality of their nemesis.  And they find they despise their old existence…instead of loving and being drawn to it…like they once were.

And now here…instead of embracing the culture I once relished in….I felt like a fish out of water.  Dying, searching, seeking a place to swim.  Seeking living water, where I can live.

It is then my husband sees it.  A cross high upon an old brick building.  I am pulled to it, almost as if mechanically.

I see the stained glass and remember the grace that found me….when I too would be wandering these very same streets, what seems like life times ago.

And as I spot it, a man NOT in fancy clothes, emerges slowly from behind the stone.

“How are you?”  He rambles on, as if we have known him forever.

I am grateful that someone smiles, reaches….knows we even exist…on these self centered streets, obsessed with Louis Vuitton and Victoria Secret.

But, there is something about this person.  I can’t put my finger on it.  His eyes flash, His heart seems to gush with the awareness of us…and our awareness of Him.

He tells us about the church.  “Built in the 1800’s.”  He knows this church well.  He sleeps here in the crevasses of its steeple shadows.

“I am homeless.”  He tells us.  Not at all ashamed.  Not smelling like alcohol.  Not holding his head down in shame.

In fact He looked bold, strong, willing, eager.  Befriending us more than all the heels-wearing caught up ones, staring at their reflections, carrying hundreds of dollars of material possessions.

We talk a long while.  His mom works just miles from where I grew up.  He used to live and hang out nearby where we now are from.  Naming streets, stores, locations he would never know unless he had been where we have come from. Coincidence? 

What brought him out of the U.S. to Canada?  Giving up a his life to live in the shadows of the cross pointing to the sky?

He says he is praying for $17.00 for a hostile to sleep in that night.  It is

getting dark and he has no where but the church walls, the crosses shadow as His shelter to lay his head tonight.

I pull out a twenty.  Seeming almost too small.  He gasps, as if it were gold. “I can’t take it”….He pauses.

“Please take it, it’s really not much.”  I offer.  Not wanting anything, but to get this beaming man we have now become friends with, off the street.

I questioned if he would leave immediately after we handed him money.  But instead He stood awe-struck as if twenty dollars was a million in his pocket.

“I can’t believe I am going to get a mat to sleep on tonight.  Thank you.” This
blue eyed stranger responds, shaking our hands fervently.  Dirty hands meeting our open palms.

He stays.  We chat like old friends.  Him sharing more about the church we so desperately wanted to go inside of.

He shared how during the daylight this church states, “Always open.”  And how I think, like us, the walls of our hearts should read the same.

And it astounds me….A church, in the middle of the streets filled with people
living openly, defiantly in front of many, would open up it’s doors continually, receiving homeless men like this angel we are now meeting.  This man greeting us with greater zeal than the people most seemingly like us.

And I wonder…How can the underprivileged, the dirty, societies outcasts seem to connect with us more than those like us….driving new cars on the streets of this iron fortress? 

Still oh how I longed to run my hands along the benches hundreds, if not thousands, have sat upon.  Oh how I longed to hear the music of heaven….that glorious music that lifts up The One who looks upon our friend as He sleeps barren out here in the streets of the city…underneath the cross and the wide open heavens.

And sometimes heaven is in the hearts of the people we least expect it to be….in the eyes of the ones we least likely expect to see it in.

Heaven peering joyously in the heart and face of a man who hadn’t found God in the places the others are aimlessly seeking Him in.

Though poor, this man above all, here on the streets, was rich.  His heart overflowing with mercy and love.  His eyes sparkling, His hands humble, His grace full for anyone who was unafraid to talk to Him.

While miles from this Holy Temple, people staggered and shopped and longed to find God in themselves….in others. In anything tangible they can grip hold of.

I know.  I once was them.

But, how ironic that the poor in Spirit are often those who God finds.  The meek, humble, the most least likely are the ones who find their way to the banqueting table.

That night…we didn’t sleep in some five star hotel like we were planning.  We just couldn’t after meeting the man with Jesus eyes who slept on the floor of the brick building….that was the church.

Instead, we saved our money and drove home to sleep on our own five year old mattress.  Rejoicing that God could redeem someone who used to look for hope in the windows of the elite, eyes dimming….and not even knowing it.

Laying in bed that night.  We give thanks for the redemption work in our lives and the pillow top of Grace we now safely rest upon tonight.

For how upside-down is His Kingdom?  Sometimes God is found in nothing.  And how everything can be empty.  And sometimes the homeless look most like Jesus. If we will simply stop and really see them.

Sometimes the saddest eyes can be in those staggering, or those speeding, noses high in their Mercedes….

While Christ is found clearly, in the ragged ones…who sleep in the shadows of the steeple.  Nothing keeping them from heaven.  No man-made ceilings, hindering them from seeing God for who He is.  From grasping what we all really are a part from Him….

Nothing.  Small.  Ragged….

Regardless of what we drive.  How we dress.  Or where we live.

(Linking with Tracy, Emily, Missional Women)