“Would you like to join us? You don’t have to eat alone.”
The man wasn’t a member of our congregation. He was there to speak later in the evening about his experience living in a transitional community. All I could tell about him was that he didn’t know anyone and he was a veteran. He accepted my invitation, and we introduced ourselves, as well as our children, and he told us bits and pieces of his story. He and my husband talked about their military service, and the kids regaled him with nonsense stories.
Later, we learned that he had once tried to kill himself. That he was estranged from his family–a wife and children. That he had ended up homeless after years working an $80,000-a-year job. After he spoke, I approached him to encourage him to keep telling his story because it was so important for people to hear. He remarked that he felt bad for sitting with us at dinner when we didn’t know the whole of his story, as if it would have made a difference in our invitation. (It wouldn’t have.)
I wondered if he’d be rejected before.
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I recently started watching “Call the Midwife,” the BBC series based on the memoirs of a young midwife who worked in London’s East End (a poor section of the city) in the 1950s. Jenny Lee, the main character, is faced with a number of new experiences. She is unused to the living conditions of her patients. She is visibly disturbed by bugs crawling around in their houses, by the behaviors of the women and men she comes into contact with, and the smells they emit. At one point she cries out to one of the nuns with whom she lives and works, “I didn’t know people lived like this!” The nun replies, “But they do and that is why they are here.”
Christopher Campbell via Unsplash
Read the rest of this post at Putting on the New, where I blog on the 12th of every month.