My Doorway

 

I hear a knock on the door. I don’t recognize this young man standing on my porch. He’s looking for work on a ranch. My two-acre place hardly constitutes a ranch so I call a few neighbors in an attempt to help this guy out.

We talk a few minutes and he decides it’s time to leave. I ask him how he got to my house. He tells me he walked 4-miles from town.

My wife looks at me and says give the guy a ride back into town and I do. On the way we start talking about life and all that stuff. A connection is made so I tell him to call me and I’ll buy him coffee sometime. His life story was complex and painful and difficult and something inside me felt the need to help.

Andrew did call me and we went out for coffee several times. But after about a month he just disappeared.

Two years later I get a phone call at KEZI. It’s Andrews mother. She tells me Andrew is the young man I reported on the night before who had walked into oncoming traffic on I-105 and killed himself. She asks me if I would mind officiating Andrews funeral. She told me how much he used to talk about his friend Rick Dancer. He remembered me because apparently I was one of the few people who had listened to him. It seems Andrew didn’t have a lot of people in his life.

I showed up that day at a cemetery in Springfield and did as his mother had asked. She kept in touch with me for many years. It was apparent their family had a lot of issues, as many families do these days.

I don’t know why I’m writing this memory on computer paper. I think this all comes from a conversation I had with a friend the other day about living my life on the edge. He told me you must have been living like Jesus the proof is in all the strange things that occur in your life. He reminded me that the same things happened to Christ.

This is causing me to go back and remember those moments. To write down the odd and memorable moments that happened when I was open to them.

I wonder how many times we miss great moments because we are too busy or not listening?

God, open me up to even more, please.