Offerings

The bill is folded where I can get at easily in my front pocket.  I touch it several times as I am heading down the street, making sure it hasn't fallen onto the pavement or been blown by the wind of the commuter buses.  I would rather risk this than fumble for it when the need arises.  I did not know this yesterday.  Then I was not ready.  You must always be ready.  I know this now, although I wonder about this as I walk, and even as I write about it now.  They hold out their hands asking for it, needing it.  Stand out in the freezing rain or burning heat literally beg for it. Are they also flat broke of pride?  Is the blood pumping through their bodies different than mine?  I beg to be heard, to be loved; God forgive me, even admired.  I do not ask for these things out loud, but I take them when offered, without shame.  No.  They are just like me, and we are both embarrassed for the other.  People shove their hands into their pockets with their heads down and pretend they don't see.  Aren't food and water more basic needs?  Love?  Yet we are not embarrassed to give or receive them.  They don't need to be offered quickly, like passing a pencil to a fellow student who forgot his.  Pass. Grab.  Thank you.  God bless you.  Nobody saw it.  Saved.

I remember handing Christmas cookies through the bars to young men once while visiting them in jail.  This may have been the one time money would have hurt less.  We had to turn each cookie sideways, giving us time to look into the faces of the inmates.  Or worse, them looking into ours.  Pathetic, this ritual.  Stand in line, hold out your hand, grab the cookie, thank you, ma'am.  You are  not my mother; it's Christmas, and you have given me a cookie, and I am no longer a child, and I am no longer innocent,  yet I remember to say thank you, thank you ma'am.   I remember when cookies at Christmas were important.  I remember when I was once important.  I remember.

I have told anyone who would listen that I will never forget those lost boys, but could never go back there, though I ache to at times.  My oldest son was 20 that Christmas.  Every inmate had his eyes, his arms.  It was J.P.'s fingers that curled around each neatly wrapped cookie, and his shoulders that hunched and cowered in cheap cotton prison clothes.  And so after only one or two, I stopped watching them turn and shuffle away like old men.  To this day I ask God to tell their mothers that some of them even smiled.  Even though none of them did.

And so I think it's his mother who most breaks my heart, even though I can only imagine her wondering about her son.  Dirty, hungry, shamed, shunned.  His earthly home a box.  Does she call out to him at night or wrap the blankets a little too tightly to warm him, too?  Does he call to her?  Do they pray to You together and only You know,  their prayers blending together like music?  Does she rail at him and ask why?     Why God has he has chosen to break and run and believe the lies?  God please don't let them hurt him.  Why did he do this... Choose this.. Become this.  Hide him from me, God, I can't look.  Give him back to me, Lord.  I can't bear this.

This child I bore I cannot bear.

And so I reach into my pocket as our eyes lock, and he takes it.  This wadded up bill, all he will ever know, or have of me.  He is strong.  Will he not work?  His grasp is strong.  You aren't helping, they tell me.  Making it worse.  Keeping him down.  I only know to give what I have.  I am my brother's keeper.  Lord, please take and use this widow's mite.  God bless the child.  He is my son.  They are all my son.

"In my Father's house are many mansions.  If it were not so, I would have told you.  I go to prepare a place for you." ~ 1 John 14:2