As I ate my hot grill cheese sandwich in a little café in upstate South Carolina, I told a couple of my friends about a man I met when I was the pastor for a church in downtown Columbia. At this particular church, often during the day, people congregated around the front steps or sat on the stone wall along our driveway. At night they slept in shelters, tents, or sometimes behind the HVAC unit of our sanctuary. Michael was one of those folks.
One hot summer afternoon Michael knocked on the door of the office building with a simple request. He didn’t want money, food, or a ride anywhere; he wanted to know if I would let him take a nap on our porch because its cement, in addition to the porch’s overhang, was shaded by old oak trees and was “so cool.”
I thought about it for less than a second but I’ll confess that in that split second I wondered how it would look to potential church visitors as they passed and I remembered that choir practice was going to start in just a couple of hours but still, I quickly said, “Sure you can Michael. I’ll just have to wake you if you are still here when the choir members start coming.”
“No problem Rev. It’s just so hot and I am so tired. I just need a few minutes.”
He put his pack down, fluffed it a bit to transform it into a pillow, lay down on the concrete floor and closed his eyes. I quietly closed the door and went back to my desk.
About an hour later I figured I better check on him. I snuck up to the window, parted the blinds, and saw that he hadn’t budged. I looked at him for several moments, his matted red hair, thick auburn beard, worn army boots, and stained clothes. It occurred to me that there had once been a day when someone held young Michael in their arms and said things like, “It’s a boy!” “Oh look, he has red hair!” “He looks just like you.” “We are going to call him Michael.”
Perhaps a minister, standing in front of the people of God, held him, placed a hand dripping with water from the font on his forehead, slowly traced a cross, and said, “Michael, I baptize you…” He was beautiful. I wanted to kiss on him on his forehead and tell him that he was a wonderful child of God. I gently opened the door and told him it was time to wake up.
Michael was on my mind because two days before lunch with my friends I went to a Bible study at Haywood Street Congregation in Asheville, NC. When I walked in the lobby of this church which strives to be “a witness to include the most excluded,” there were three people lying on the floor because the recliners in the room where people often come to rest were full. I was glad for them. The mountains have started taking on a late fall chill and I imagined a dry, warm place to rest safely was no small thing.
I told my lunch friends about that and I told them about Michael. I told them that I had shared this story about me, Michael, and my epiphany in more than one sermon but I will tell it no more. Now it makes me sad. A little ashamed.
Now days I ask myself, why did I tell Michael that he would have to leave when choir practice started? Why would church members coming to sing about Jesus be a reason to cut short a child of God’s welcome rest? Why did I not ask him if he wanted to nap in the conditioned air that the HVAC unit provided? I have answers to those questions but none of them are particularly good.