Judging by Appearances

²Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. ³If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, "Here's a good seat for you," but say to the poor man, "You stand there" or "Sit on the floor by my feet," ⁴have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? (James 2:2-4)

This actually happened to me a few weeks ago and I've thought often of blogging about it, but I'm just getting around to it now. I'm not certain why it's been hanging about my brain so long, but here it is:

I was filling up the gas tank one fine morning at a station at the bottom of the hill. I'm always a little edgy at that particular station because people asking for change are pretty common—last time, I mentioned to the guy asking for money for gas to get home that it must be some kind of black hole in the area, because so many people end up out of gas just at that particular station. (For the record, he replied to this with the observation, "Yeah, and it sucks.") I've got that underlying suspicion of such folk, unfair as that may be (though our talks with our police officer friend this weekend reinforced some of my worries), and I'd rather avoid such conscience-poking confrontations if I can.

On this particular morning, I spied a shabby-looking fellow who I immediately knew was going to ask me for change: shabby, a stained green canvas coat on his back, a watch cap pulled down low over his wild-bearded head, several bags of various kinds hanging from his shoulders. So I went about pumping my gas, waiting for him to come over.

Someone did approach, but when I turned it wasn't my trash-sorter: it was a younger man with long hair. He needed to get to work, said he, and needed gas to get there. He offered to sell me a beat-up old power saw in order to get the cash. Now this was novel, at least for me: I'd not been offered a chance to buy merchandise for change. My suspicion is that this guy does this to everyone, knowing pretty well that most folks will just give him a few dollars because (a) they feel sorry for him being so selfless; (b) they don't carry enough cash to make a decent offer on a power saw that they wouldn't feel guilty about; and (c) they wouldn't rob him of his future potential livelihood. (There was an episode of Corner Gas kind of like that, in which Brent kept offering to pay for everything with a $100 bill which people either couldn't break or were suspicious was forged, so everyone just let him keep his money.)

Meanwhile, the worn-out fellow in the green coat had come up on us to poke through the trash bin between the pumps. Upon hearing the younger man's story, he dug into his pocket and held forth about 6¢ in an open palm to offer to the supplicant. We both looked at the older man, and the younger waved him away. Meanwhile, I nodded to the collector, who returned the nod and moved on to the next trash can.

It was a brilliant moment. It reminded me just a bit of the gospel incident of the widow's mite, and was a wee reminder of the difference between poor and poor in spirit.

Make of it what you will.

ps—I want to say a big "Huzzah!" to the folks at Blogger who instituted that handy "automatic save" function. I had accidentally closed the tab with this post when I was about 5/6^ths of the way through and nearly wept at the thought of having to do it over again. But it was all savéd! Kudos to you, Blogger techno-geeks!