For the last week, I’ve been struggling with whether to write and publish this post. But I hope it will resonate with other Christians who may have found themselves in similar situations. A week ago Sunday, as my wife and I pulled into the church parking lot, there was a disabled man standing before the door of our church begging for money. By his appearance, it was easy to guess he was homeless.
As we approached him, my wife asked a couple brief questions and quickly learned he didn’t speak much German but was apparently ill, having paperwork from a prior emergency visit. He had no insurance but someone told him to come to our church for help.
Desperate people don’t often show up at our church and we didn’t really know what to do. So we simply ended the conversation and walked into church. Of course we had the perfect excuse. I’m the leader for pre-service prayer and we needed to get to it.
But before we could sit down with others who had gathered for prayer, we realized we’d made a mistake and needed to go outside and try to speak with him again to learn more. So we left others to pray and stepped outside with one other member of our team who volunteered to go with us. She had been told by another congregant the man was Romanian and she was fluent, so it made sense and certainly helped us out.
The Tragic Fate of Those All Around Us
We caught up with him as he was walking away and stopped him to talk. He’d come to Germany last spring in search of work but couldn’t find any. He and his wife were living on the street, sleeping on the steps of a Catholic Church kind enough to allow it.
It’s all too common in Germany. There are many Romanians, Cinti and Roma living here, searching for work. Most seek any kind of temporary job, typically in agriculture and farming. Many are homeless. They leave their children behind with family members as there’s no way in Romania to feed their families. There’s simply no work. Life is so hard that life expectancy is short. Many die in their forties.
This man’s situation was far worse. He was disabled, struggled to walk with crutches and was suffering with leukemia. Without treatment, the future is catastrophic – for he, his wife and children. Neither has sufficient command of German to easily employ. Worse, it’s hard to imagine he can land a job in his present physical condition. It leaves only his wife to earn money or for each to beg on the streets.
I don’t want to moralize but just walking by, robs a person of their dignity. We are the most blessed people in all history. But somehow, it hasn’t prompted us to bless others. It almost seems, to justify our comfortable lives, we must insulate ourselves from all the suffering around us. But denying justice to the poor is a sin (Isaiah 10:2; Jeremiah 5:28).
A Crisis of Conscience
We asked him how we could help. He needed treatment that could well be unaffordable. He also needed warm blankets and winter shoes for he and his wife. We gave him some cash, promised to get him some warm shoes and blankets, got his name & number and arranged to meet with him again.
Returning to church, I felt deeply convicted. Here was a person in desperate need and we had nothing to offer him. None of us knew what to do, so we just walked by without even attempting to reach out. It’s as if desperate people know better than to go to a church for help – and it showed. We were completely unprepared.
And of course, the sermon topic was “The Prodigal Son” and the Father’s unmatched love for his son, including Isaiah 58:7 about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Ironic, huh? You know this has to be true, because you can’t write fiction this good!
Trouble was, I was stuck on the parable of the good Samaritan. You know the part, where the priest sees the man beaten and half dead, yet passes on the other side of the road. And then a Levite does the same. That was me. That was all of us. I didn’t even think to offer him a cup of coffee!
I was also stuck on Acts 3:6, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” But the truth is, we have silver and gold, and I can’t help wondering if that’s why we haven’t got healing power in the church. There’s no need for us to rely on God!
We’re not a wealthy church by any means. Not even close. But compared with these people living day-to-day on the street, we’re ultra-wealthy. And if these were our children, I’m certain we’d react in a very different way. And I wonder if, like the Laodicean church, I’m spiritually bankrupt. It’s just too easy to say, “We can’t save everyone”. But too often what follows, is that we save no one. That’s spiritual bankruptcy.
A Week has Passed and I’m Still Struggling
A week has passed and I still don’t know how to meaningfully help. We have an “Umsonstladen” – where we give away lightly used clothes, and our leader was kind enough to load us up with blankets and warm weather gear. We then met with the couple who also had a Romanian friend who spoke good German. It allowed us to get to know a bit about each other.
We also contacted a Pastor here in Koblenz who ministers specifically to Romanians, Cinti and Roma. Though we didn’t know him, he was kind enough to meet to help us by meeting with them a couple times. He is well connected with Romanians in Koblenz and has extensive experience with housing searches, the city Job Center and knows a few Romanian physicians. Most importantly, he urged them to put their faith in Christ. And of course, he emptied his wallet giving them what he had so they could eat.
We met again with them Saturday morning but with no real news to report. He’d been unable to locate emergency housing and it wasn’t clear there’d be assistance from the Job Center. German bureaucracy can get complicated. After the meeting, we gave them some additional money, bought them breakfast and told them we’d be in touch again soon. Through these meetings, we were getting to know them and finding they were terrific. It pains me all the more that there’s still so little we’ve been able to do.
And of course, Sunday service came again. While everyone was singing and praising God, I was bent over in my seat, sobbing uncontrollably. What stuck in my mind was a well-known quote from Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., “I heard a man upon a dung heap say, ‘If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He is not God.'” And I was praying that I would not be that dung heap upon which this poor man suffered and died. The worst of it was, I wasn’t sure whether I was sobbing in pity for this man’s suffering, or in self-pity for my own wretchedness.