Picture this: the dim silhouette of an old church before dawn, its windows full of light. A line of ragged men curls around the building. They stomp their feet to keep warm, make jokes to pass the time as they wait for the doors to open.
When I moved across the country to begin my graduate studies, this little church was the first place I was known by name. And those weary men, waiting in the dark, were my first friends.
I drove to this church every Friday morning to help serve the breakfast hosted by the local rescue mission. Or at least, I thought I had come to serve. I soon learned that there was no shortage of volunteers to sweep and mop. “Why don’t you sit and enjoy a cup of coffee?” the breakfast coordinator asked, nodding at the tables full of homeless guests.
I walked to a table where four men and one woman were laughing over steaming cups of coffee.
“May I sit here?” I asked shyly.
“ ‘Course, darlin’,” said a man with a thick Texas drawl. “We’ve been waitin’ for you.”
Over the next few months, this table became my Friday home. The conversation was lively but always wide-ranging. Frank would tell me about growing up in the piney woods of east Texas. Two newcomers–just passing through–gave me all the ins and outs of how to ride a freight train car without getting locked inside. And when John learned that my PhD program was focused on literature and religion, he pulled a battered notebook from his bag and leaned toward me eagerly. “In your classes,” he asked, “have you studied anything about biblical typology? Because I’ve been searching the Scriptures for secret signs…”
And then there was Michael. Michael was there every week, far more cheerful than anyone has the right to be at five o’clock in the morning. He had an easy laugh and was friendly with everyone, but over the months we shared breakfast together, I learned about the dark roads that had brought him to life on the streets. Having grown up in an impoverished, physically abusive household, he’d spent decades addicted to crack cocaine. By the time I met him, he was over fifty and desperate to be free from his addiction and all that came with it. But all his friends were addicts. Most of his family were addicts. Any efforts to step away from his addiction meant losing the only relationships he had.
Beneath his warm smile, Michael’s loneliness was etched into the lines of his face. As our familiarity grew over months and months of Friday-morning breakfasts, Michael began to ask, without much subtlety, if we could spend time together.
“Hey, you’ve got an apartment, right?” he would ask, as though having a lease was a novelty. “Maybe we could hang out there sometime? Watch a movie or something?”
I was twenty-two years old, living alone in a 400-square-foot studio. Here was a man–twice my age, fighting a tremendous addiction, homeless–asking if he could come over. The imprudence of saying yes seemed so clear. And yet, while my head was trying to compose a diplomatic way to say, “I don’t think we should,” my heart was trembling in the presence of his pain. His request lacked insight and social graces, but fundamentally, Michael was simply saying, “I’m made in God’s image, and that means I’m not supposed to be alone. But I’m so alone. Can you help?”
Impossible. Even as I said the word, I knew it wasn’t true. My parents had raised me to love the Bible, and as a young child I had said I wanted to follow Jesus, and had been baptized into Christ’s Body. I had been taught – and had believed – that being a Christian meant that I wasn’t just obeying Jesus on the strength of my own will, but that somehow, mysteriously, the Spirit of the Living God would empower me to do the work of His kingdom.
And what was the work of His Kingdom? Well, it was all over the Bible. look at what the prophet Isaiah said in chapter 58:
“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
(Isaiah 58:6-7 ESV)
Either we “bring the homeless poor into [our] house” or we “hide [ourselves] from [our] own flesh.” In all my years attending church, I’d never heard a single sermon on this text, no instruction on how to do this hard thing when you were a single girl with a tiny apartment. But I daydreamed that there might be a way to say “yes” to Michael. I imagined answering him by saying, “My house is too small, but I know where we can go.” And then we’d run across town to the church where I worshiped on Sunday mornings, throw open the doors and say, “Okay, people of God - here’s Michael. He needs a family, and he wants to watch a movie on Friday. I’ll bring the popcorn, but we need y’all to be there, too.”
To my shame, I wasn’t brave enough to try saying “yes” to Michael in the ways I imagined. My household of one was too small to bear the risks of a deeper relationship, but I didn’t trust my brothers and sisters in Christ enough to invite them into this risk with me. The next semester, I was given an early-morning teaching assignment at the university. I reasoned that the Friday morning breakfast no longer fit my schedule, and I quietly made my farewells to Michael, John, and all the others.
There were plenty of non-profits and resource centers in our town to provide for Michael’s material needs, but he was wise enough to want more. He wanted to be in a real home, with popcorn and movies and friendships that went beyond Friday mornings. Seventeen years later, I still think about Michael often. In particular, I think of him whenever I hear the powerful words of Jesus in Revelation 3:20: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”
We tend to picture Christ in royal glory when we hear these words, forgetting that he is positioning himself as a stranger in need of welcome, echoing his promise in Matthew 25 to meet us in the faces of the poor and needy. His request is not that different, after all, from Michael’s: Open your door so we can eat together. But in Revelation, the veil over this plea is pulled back: opening the door to the distressing stranger is somehow linked to opening the door to Christ Himself, and to our own salvation.
But how to open the door? It’s not easy. The structures we inhabit, socially, architecturally, and relationally, seem designed more to hide us from strangers than to help us open the door to them. But there are ways: practical, daily, joyful ways that we can rediscover the startling treasures of hospitality. That’s what I hope to explore in the coming months (and, Lord willing, in the book proposal I’m currently drafting).
When he knocked on my door, Michael gave me a lesson in homemaking that changed my life. If he were to knock again today, with God’s help, I hope I’d be able to say, “Come on in. The popcorn’s ready.”
Ooff! This one hurts. That rug burn/turf burn sort of pain of exposure. I built a life and family on welcoming sojourners on the way. Whether for a night, a month or a year, I’ve almost always had a place and a space to welcome a Michael. As a woman built more like a linebacker than a debutante, I’ve had the privilege of not thinking twice about my physical safety in situations like this, but rather being led by my intuition. I’ve also been on the receiving end of such radical grace.
Until this last year, when a family member became the untoward threat, and God made it clear that continued shared space had become dangerously life and soul threatening. The very person I spent 20+ years building a hospitable life with was now challenging every idea I had about sacrificial love, covenant marriage, loving the mentally I’ll and having an open door. I had to remove him and slam the door shut. Antithetical to every ounce of my being. I had to trust that my brothers and sisters in Christ could step in where I could no longer stand. And figure out how to be ok when they failed him and me. I continue to wrestle with everything else, but I love how your posts challenge me to think, acknowledge that this becoming Christ-like is a messy, fretful journey where we get it wrong many times before we get it right, and that Jesus still makes good use of the mess. You prompt me to reflect and dig in, creating space to be ok with things not being ok… a virtual sanctuary of sorts.