Tonight was polarizing.
By accident, I found myself at the party of the merger of a couple innovative companies to form this one. There, blocks from our studio, was a gathering of influential people (many of them in film and media) celebrating a new adventure.
And there, my soul was fed.
The words/feelings/senses trapped in my guts came out, through others’ voices and stories. There I talked to an artist who had already accomplished the task of painting the entire book of Revelation, and was now hard at work studying and sketching Acts. She told bits of her story of coming to Jesus at 21 in the mountains of Switzerland after living with drug dealers in the States, then eventually returning to help found a popular social justice magazine.
There I met a kindred spirit who was a missionary kid in Spain, went to a high-brow college in the U.S. to study something like sounded like rocket science, but ended up with a job placed in his lap that turned him into a writer and director now planning on going to Africa for his first feature film next year.
It was there where affirming words were spoken, Spirit-fed, yet delivered by humans.
Just an hour before, on entering the side door of our studio, a seemingly homeless man perched near our doorway asks for 65 cents. “What do you need it for?” I ask.
“Cigarettes.”
“I don’t really want you buying cigarettes,” I say. “There not good for you.” It’s humorous to entertain the thought that Mr. Cigarette cares what a seemingly “rich” young man thinks.
“Hey man, I didn’t want to lie to you,” he responds. "But I actually need more than that, but I didn't want to ask." I ask him what he needs. "Two dollars," he says.
I reason that honesty counts for something and he’s going to smoke anyways, so I go inside, grab a few bucks, hand it to him and suggest he purchase some food. By this time, another man had gathered, the two going back twenty years or more.
The conversation steers toward the purple bruises spread on the left side of Mr. Cigarette’s face, who is white, mixed with biting commentary from the man I’ll now refer to as #2, who is black.
“They all came after me, they were kicking me in the face,” Mr. Cigarette says, starting to lift up his shirt as a gesture to show the wounds. “But I took one of them,” referring to the beating.
He continues, “Now, I don’t mean to offend anyone,” Mr. Cigarette says, looking at myself and #2, “but three [n-word]…”
“Hey man, don’t say that word,” I say. “That’s not cool.”
#2 echoes my request is less graceful language.
Mr. Cigarette tries to defend his word choice, but the offense has negatively affected his audience.
“Give me a sip of that,” #2 says, as Mr. Cigarette reveals a bottle of 5 O’Clock Vodka hidden underneath his coat.
“This is why he gets his a** kicked,” #2 says. “I’ll teach him a lesson.”
Next, #2 takes a drink, walks to the side of the street, and dumps the vodka onto the red brick road, while Mr. Cigarette watches like a child locked in his baby seat.
“F___ you, man,” is the first line of explicit remarks from Mr. Cigarette. “That’s my booze. F___ you, man. You're not my friend.” I heard Oscar Wilde said something about true friends stabbing us in the front.
“Will you properly of this?” #2 says to me, trying to hand me the bottle.
I decline and weakly try to mediate on some level, but I don’t remember what I said. Talk about awkward. Doing my best to downplay the situation and make peace between the agitated parties, I turn and head toward my office. When I look back, #2 is nearly a block away, yelling that it was good to meet me, Mr. Cigarette sits in a heap stewing over lost booze.
The point of all this isn’t to tell you I gave money to a bum that was probably immediately spent on booze after I left, or that somehow I ended up at a party with important people, to make you think I’m important.
The point, to sound completely like your Bible Camp counselor at a bonfire, is that Jesus really makes a difference. Really. In the confrontation on the street, the spirit present was not that of peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness or self-control, but a spirit of hatred, jealously, judgment, envy and drunkenness.
However, the Spirit of God, so present at the party, has taken what was broken inside all of us at one time, healed us, renewed our minds, and equipped us to take whatever is noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and praiseworthy, to give a busted world a glimpse and invitation toward beauty.
As Paul suggests in Ephesians 4, “Think about such things.”
Posts
