A Tuna Sandwich and a Dollar

Can you give me a dollar?” Daily he begs —this neat, clean, well-shaved, and stocky man. He sits in front of a bank as he solicits one dollar from every passerby. Another homeless person —disheveled, dirty, with matted hair and cut-off pants— takes up his position under a tree with sparse shade. The earth beneath him is grassless, but it is his bed at night and his seat by day. He doesn’t beg but looks off into the distance, cursing the invisible as he moves restlessly from side to side.

All who pass him as they enter the supermarket are aware that he is there. One day two people were in the marketplace.

The first passerby saw the first beggar smoking a cigarette and asking for a dollar. So that is what he wants my money for —to smoke cigarettes? Yesterday she had heedlessly passed him by; today he would get a dollar.

She hands one to him and returns to her work at the office and tells a friend how good it feels to have given even one dollar and what a blessed feeling of sympathy flows over her. The second passerby is in the eastern part of the small town. She has always felt uneasy about approaching homeless people, for she figures that mental instability goes hand in hand with being dirty and on the streets.

Yet God has been speaking to her: How could you see your “brother in need” and shut up your “heart from him”? (1 John 3:17, NKJV).

She also recalls that one day “the King will … say, … ‘Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me’” (Matthew 25:40, NKJV). She exited the supermarket with her groceries in one hand and a few dollars rolled up in the other. She had saved the change for the young man and stretched it toward him, though she had a nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach.

He looked her way and said, “Buy me a cake!” She obediently returned to the supermarket, but upon finding no cake, she bought a tuna sandwich and gave it to him. He took it. With a glad heart, she walked to the car with a sense of well-being that she had helped someone that day. You, too, know the feeling, don’t you, when you have done something for Jesus by reaching out to someone else?

Hyacinth V. Caleb