Other People’s Beauty

My door bell rang the other night and I found my neighbor (the same one who once came to my house for coffee at 4 am) shivering in my porch chair.  She wanted coffee again, and she wanted me to hire her to pull some weeds, because they had no money for food.

They had taken money from me earlier without performing the promised labor in exchange for the ten dollars. I had told her the ten dollars didn’t matter so much, but that I was not going to think of her as someone who took and didn’t repay.  I was not going to hire them again until they made it right. But I would get her some coffee. 

“Well, then I guess I’ll starve tonight,” she said.

As I collected the coffee, I looked at the catfish and jasmine rice, which I was about to cook. I didn’t think she really wanted food; I thought she wanted money.  I had offered her food before, and she had declined.  And, I wanted the leftovers for my lunch.

“I’m cooking soon,” I said when I returned with the coffee.  “Do you want me to bring you something?”

“Sure,” she said, her face brightening.

“Do you like fish?”

“I love fish!”

So I took her a portion of the meal I had intended for my lunches.

The tension of truth and love and how easily I get frustrated with people reminds me of the long runs I’ve been doing. 

I’ve been parking at the abandoned commercial brick building in south Elkhart at the head of the bike trail.  I set off with my bottle of G-2 (a drink like Gatorade but better) and a foil packet of glucose gel.  I pass the ugly chain-link fences of lower Elkhart, strands of barbed wire keeping intruders from factory property, some of them sagging as if someone has just escaped between the strands. 

There’s a pallet shop that smells like a pine forest and a bridge with its grafitti about vandal life.  The trail parallels the railroad track. The occasional train passes, startling and majestic, screaming up to an intersection. Right now there are fallen leaves as big as dinner plates and wild grapes dangling on the chain-link fence bordering the railroad.

I’m doing pretty well, I usually think somewhere at this point.  I may be overweight, but that doesn’t mean I can’t run.  I meet a few runners, all of them tall and thin, but I feel gracious and comfortable.  Sometimes I even experience a weightless feeling like flying, effortlessly consuming miles.

By the time I approach the manicured lawns of Goshen, I am losing steam.

A week ago when I reached the six mile mark, I turned and headed back. It was about at that point I realized I hadn’t brought enough G-2.  The electrolyte liquid was sloshing in the plastic bottle, and I knew there would never be enough for the whole run home.  My face was already crusty with salt, and my lips were dry.

At mile 7, I tore the top off my glucose packet and eagerly consumed it, along with a strictly rationed swallow of G-2. I went on. But at 8.3 miles, I realized I was officially hitting the “wall”.  Every part of my body hurt, even my neck and upper arm.  I looked longingly at the grass strip beside the path.  I really just wanted to lie down right there.

Gone was the triumph, the feeling of flying, the effortless miles.  I was suddenly a cripple, miles away from my car and my extra bottle of Gatorade.  As my liquid diminished even further, I looked at passing bikers.  I wanted to fall on my knees and beg them for a sip of water.  I didn’t care if they disdained me for my exhaustion, or mocked my expression of pain.

I walked more than I ran that last 3 and 1/2 miles.  My whole body was rebelling.  My right side ached (perhaps my liver?), my stomach had fleeting moments of nausea, and my feet were burning with every step. My only goal now was to finish without becoming a regional news article by curling up in the roadway.  I’m too overweight for this, I tell myself. Why did I ever decide to do this?

At this point I always get enormously irritated by bikers in my way, or cars at intersections that don’t give me the right of way or other runners who look fresh and cheery.  Now, if someone gets in my way, I want to snarl.  Even the trains, so majestic before, are suddenly annoying for going so fast with people who just sit. 

About this time I pass the wild grapes again, and head into the fenced factories of Elkhart. The barbed wire, the semis, the pallet shop… all are so much more beautiful than the manicured lawns because they mean I am almost home, almost back to the extra bottle of G-2.    I finally reach my car and collapse in the front seat, grabbing the bottle of G-2 and gulping it.

It is as if I experience youth, middle age, and old age in the course of just a few hours on these brutal runs.  And despite my exhaustion, I find two things to be true.  First, if someone had been judging me, their verdict would have changed depending which point in the journey they would have seen me. Second, my perspective changed with the changing of the mile markers. 

Third… 

Once on my run, I saw a man on a recumbent bike approaching. I scowled to myself and tried to ignore him, but then I saw he was looking at me. He lifted his left hand and I thought he was waving, but he said, “I have to give you a high five. Good job!”

“Thank you!” I said sincerely, and I felt much better. 

So third, it is possible to make someone’s journey better even if you don’t know everything about them, even if they find you annoying. 

My coffee-begging neighbor…I wonder what I would see if I was able to scroll back through the miles of her life?
I took her to pick up her medications once.  As I was driving back, I talked to a friend from Laurel Street who asked me to grab some ice cream from Dairy Queen for us to share.  I debated whether I should drop her off first, and then go to Dairy Queen.  But we were right there, so I pulled in.

“Want some ice cream?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

Then, more quietly, “No one ever takes me anywhere.”

Of course they don’t.  She’s a manipulative beggar.  

And then I wonder if her story is true that her father and brothers sexually abused her from the time she was seven years old.

This seems to be the true calling of Christianity. How to walk this tight rope?  How to love without compromising, to offer compassion to those who are wrong, to keep from breaking the bruised reed, keep from quenching the smoking flax?  I don’t know.

Every day, I don’t know.

But I do know this:  Jesus Christ is the only person who ever lived who did this perfectly. When I succeed, I find that it is not my success, but my submission to the spirit of Christ that has allowed the triumph.

And I have seen this lived out in others, in things as “small” as a friendly high five. Which was not small then on that cement path eight miles in. 

It’s so interesting how things take on new meaning, depending on how many miles you’ve come, or how many years you’ve lived.

Even barbed wire is beautiful, when it means you’re almost home.