Imagine this:
You are walking through your community and you see a crippled man, profoundly crippled. He is also filthy and smelly and he spends his day sitting by the road next to his house - he cannot go far because he cannot walk. You decide to stop and sit down next to him, asking him about his life, his daily routine etc and you learn that he does nothing with his life although occasionally he gets the opportunity to sit on a pile of rubbish and sort through it. Also on a few occasions in the past he has been able to go to the city center and beg but he doesn´t like it.
As you get to know him more you learn about his dreams. He dreams that he will be able to work one day standing on his feet and as he is saying this you look again at the disfigured shapes on the ends of his stumpy legs which may have been intended to be feet. He also tells you that he is angry...but not because he cannot realize his dream but because of how people treat him. He gets beaten round the head a lot - when someone is angry annoyed or just wants some sick entertainment and they happen to be walking past where he is sitting they go up to him, hit him, maybe laugh at him as well and then just walk on by. He cannot do anything to stop them. This is also why he is dirty and smelly because he has given up on himself. He says something like this "Why should I wash if no-one likes me anyway?" Then he continues by saying that it is his fault that he gets hit. People hit him because of what he is like, because he is crippled and therefore it is his fault. So...what do you do? How do you help this man? You want to do something but feel helpless as his situation seems impossible.
Do you know that God is the God of the impossible? Is He able to help this man? What would you do knowing this information? Feel free to respond.
2 comments:
Am challenged to confront the gap in my theoretical knowledge that God is the God of the impossible and my personal faith-level for seeing the healing love of God transforming that man.
Have just been reading Acts 3 and have been impressed again by how God used the healing of the beggar to open up amazing opportunities for sharing the Gospel with a huge audience.
Might your caring about this man be the beginning of something much bigger? Love, R and M
While perhaps most of us don't run into men everyday in such a dire situation, I think that similar cases are no stretch of the imagination. When reading your post, it struck me that perhaps the saddest part of that man's situation is his view of himself, how he has internalized the way others view him and given up on himself. Simply talking to him and showing interest in his life and situation begins to break through that stigma and shows him that you see value in him. I think a big part of most of Jesus' miracles was how he reaffirmed the value of individuals he healed. He reached out and touched lepers, he talked to unclean bleeding women. He saw the value of those others tried to pretend didn't exist (or even worse treated poorly as that man in your story). Talking to someone like that man in a way that shows love helps restore his humanity to him. Of course, Jesus treatment of rejects and cripples was often accompanied by physical healing, though even he didn't heal everyone he came across. So that is definitely something to be prayed about or if there is something else God would have to do to help this man - but talking and showing you care about him as a person is a good start, as well as a testimony to those who are watching.
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