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I got a call from a friend today, telling me about an encounter she had in the city with someone begging for spare change.  When I asked her what his story was, she said that he was a Christian whose wife was sick and he just needed a little money to help get some food for the day.

“Was he a middle-aged white guy- tall with a mustache?” I asked.  Surprised, she affirmed that it was.  How did I know?  I knew because had heard that exactly story several times a week for almost the entire time The Dusty Cover was open.  Brad was a regular to drop in to the bookstore, masterfully retelling his story (with more detail than mentioned above) word for word.  Of course, the details of his story made it clear that it could not be true, given that the same unfortunate scenario played itself out so many times a week for more than a year.  However, we never made an issue with the truthfulness of his story.

Sometimes we’d give him some money or a bus pass or a hot cup of coffee.  We didn’t give him money that often, but the occasional customer would overhear his story and chip in a few bucks.  I offered to take him shopping once, but he politely, but flatly refused.  I didn’t mind this too much, because we would usually see Brad at the end of the day walking home with a few bags of groceries from Safeway.  As long as he was eating.

What made Brad such an interesting friend was that he came back so regularly with the same story.  When he would introduce himself again the next, I would remind him that we were already friends.  He would then apologize as he had a hard time remembering things.  It seemed that, expect for long term memories, he had very little capacity to remember the details of recent events.  And so, every day it was like meeting Brad for the first time.

While we could build relationships over time with many of our neighbours, this was not possible with Brad.  Each day was a fresh slate, meaning that we would have to repeat the same conversations again and again.  Every day he met us for the first time.  Every day, his first impression of us was established anew.  It would have been easy for us to dismiss him, make jokes about him or ignore him altogether.  Instead, he presented us daily with a challenge: Treat him with the love of Christ as though it was our only opportunity.  And in some was, it was.

Since the bookstore closed, we have not seen Brad very often.  However, I carry the lesson he taught me everyday.  Why should I treat others any different than Brad?  Should not every person I encounter be greeted with the fullness of the love and grace of Christ?  Familiarity can breed complacency, but Brad has taught us that every day is a new day.  Beyond the abstraction of “Love God and love others” is the mandate to embrace that love in every mundane moment, in every encounter.

This is what it means to live the Gospel one day at a time.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Evangelism, Gospel, Missional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.