Lost in a Sea of Faces

I sit in my car wrting a small thank you note.  As I write, a young college-aged man walks behind the van and opens the door of the white car next to me, gets in, sits, looks around the car frantically, gets out his phone, makes a call, gets no answer, hangs up in distress, and just waits.

With my card finished I wonder what to do. Clearly he knows I am here. Clearly I can see he is there. Yet should we just go on, each of us leading our own lives seperated by a sheet of metal and glass while each of us could be in direr need of the other. I sit and contemplate it for a minuet.

I am not just a man, vastly lost in this world
Lost in a Sea of Faces
Your body’s the bread, Your blood is the wine
Because you traded Your life for mine

Just one in a million faces

I turn off the engine, turn off the radio, look at him and wait for eye contact as I slide over to the passenger seat, and open the door. He looks at me and opens his as well. I parked too close to open the door enough to even stick my head out but I ask him nonetheless, “Do you need anything?” Quickly and sternly he answeres “No.” And even though neither of us believe him, we shut our doors.

What more can I do? As I back up, I see an “Obama ‘08″ sticker on his bumper and a nursing school university frame around his lisence plate. There is much more to his story, I am convinced….

And it just makes me wonder how many people go though life alone with everyone around them pretending like they don’t see them. Like “Ryan party of one” at the Roadhouse Grill a year ago, or the man I made eye contact with as I turned left from Nelson onto Brockton today, or the woman wearing two jackets but still cold pacing back and forth and looking around outside of Taco Bell as our family sat inside, separted only by a window, warm and full. Or the girl I walked in front of, each of us alone as we hurry off to classes in different directions. What about them? What about me? 

Can we stop isolating ourselves? Can we step out of our comfort zone, our car, our house, our seat, to say hi to someone or smile at someone or be kind to someone we have never seen and may never see again? Can we do that? Because America, people, the world, has become too isolated, too self-centered, to do that… And I’d like to see that change.

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More Than Enough

 

The strums from the guitar fill the room and rattle space in my stomach. I can’t ignore the fact that I haven’t since breakfast at 7am.  It’s now 7pm, but tonight there will be no dinner, and in the morning there will be no breakfast.  I stand in a dark room with a hundred teens as hungry as me.  Instead of complaining we are worshiping. 

I watch the screen on the wall flash the words to the next song.  The drums start.  Then the bass joins in.  Then I open my mouth and begin to sing: “You are my supply, my breath of life…”  But I stop.  Anticipating the chorus, I can no longer sing — a lump forms in my throat and my eyes begin to water.

I stare at the screen and read:

And all of you
Is more than enough for all of me
For every thirst and every need
You satisfy me with your love
And all I have in you is more than enough.

I have not eaten.  Tonight I will sleep on the floor in the same clothes I am wearing now.  I will not shower — I have no soap, no shampoo.  I will not brush my teeth — I don’t have a toothbrush or toothpaste.  Make-up is out of the question.  But I will have a sleeping bag, a pillow, a warm place to sleep, friends, shelter.  I will only live like this for thirty hours, but some live like this every day.

As the chorus approaches again, I think of the believers in Cambodia — the ones who live in a one-room house above a sewage swamp, the ones whose parents are dying of AIDS, the ones who have one pot and one kilo of rice.  Then I remember them gathered together on small plastic stools in the dirt and heat joyfully singing words similar to these.  “You are more than enough. More than I want, more than all I need.” With so little, how could I ever sing of having “more than enough” — more then enough for every want and need.  But, if standing in the midst of a congregation of Sunday whose every need is met and more, wouldn’t these words mean much more, take so much more faith and true belief to sing if I had nothing in the world? Do I, with all my “things,” truly believe that Jesus is enough — more than enough?

 With tears streaming down my cheeks and face lifted up, I am the poor Cambodia singing, I am the homeless mother singing, I am Cara Irene without food singing:

More than all I want
More than all I need
You are more than enough for me.
More than all I know
More than all I can see
You are more than enough for me.
More than all I want
More than all I need
You are more than enough for me.
More than all I know
More than all I can see
You are more than enough.

All of you
Is more than enough for
All of me
For every thirst and every need
You satisfy me with your love
And all I have in you. (Oh Yeah)
And all I have in you. (Jesus)
And all I have in you is more than enough.
More than enough.

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