BLESSED BUT EQUAL
By HARRY COVERT
ABOUT 15 YEARS AGO, I WAS all dressed up in tuxedo, headed for a nice Washington reception. I had to walk through Lafayette Park. The night was brisk and the sky clear. After all, it was autumn and the weather was changing, especially after a long hot summer.
As I strode briskly through the park, I almost stepped on several homeless people sleeping on the ground. They were dirty, smelly and hungry. They just grunted as I walked between them. In the foreground, I could see the White House, elegantly awash from the floodlights.
What a contrast. The White House, symbol of the free world, beautiful and stately on Pennsylvania Avenue and the unlovely and unloved languishing almost unnoticed across the street. (Let me point out that this was before they cleaned out Lafayette Park of the homeless.)
Trying to sidestep the people on the ground, I ran into one solitary volunteer worker coaxing a foul-smelling woman to accept a ride to a shelter for a hot meal, a bath and maybe some different clothes.
AS I PASSED TRYING TO AVOID THE unpleasant situation, the woman in a ripped dress and battered tennis shoes slipped. A nameless shelter worker and I kept her from falling to the rough cement.
At the moment I had my arms around the falling woman, I thought of an old friend who spent his retirement years visiting daily a downtown Virginia mission. He spent time with drunkards, ex-convicts, homeless and semi-retarded adults. He faithfully taught simple Bible stories to his congregation of society's rejects -- that God loved them no matter what. He visited his people daily and did so gladly.
His wasn't a ministry of glamour, money or glory. It was a ministry of care and concern.
I remember the cold winter morning my friend died. His death had come a few hours after his morning Bible study. At the funeral, his congregation of “misfits” was absent. They had stayed away because they didn't feel good enough.
None of us are really good enough but we are blessed. And, no matter what our station in life, we are all equal before the Almighty.
And, I’m proud to say it was my father who taught me that great lesson. © (Posted August 31, 2004)
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