My chest felt like a suitcase had been thrown at it. My lungs were mixing concrete, and I tried to take deep breaths without the success of actually doing it. Earlier that day, I had received an email that struck like a knife. I was angry and defensive and hurt. I wanted to cry, but adults don’t do that.
I left the office and took deep breaths — real ones. The trees and cement came together as I walked, nearing the Metro entrance. And that’s when I heard it. The unified sound of cymbal and brass melting together like that Pocahontas river scene. A trombone, two trumpets, and a percussionist, playing pop songs jazzy.
I stopped. My heart started bobbing its head and dancing — badly, I might add, because neither my body nor my soul can consistently keep time. I laughed at the tiny child, blond hair, jumping, running in circles, dancing. Her grandmother laughed with her. I took a picture and recorded the sound.
Thirty minutes later, I left the metro station and began the walk home, up a cement-hill. My eyes blinked and saw him, the same way you flip through TV channels and notice.
There he was, a man in a wheelchair, moving his legs like a drunk mouse at the base of the hill. His dark head rose slowly, defeated. I winced. And I couldn’t help it.
“Sir, you need some help? Want me to push you up?”
“I’m trying to get across the street up there.”
“Can I push you?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
His name was Keith, and he smelled like hard liquor; he’d had the wheelchair for two weeks. He slurred. People watched as I put my weight behind the man, and pushed.
When deep pain meets deep joy, it rarely stops to care what people think.
So, I helped Keith. I pushed his wheelchair across the street. To the liquor store. I didn’t pray with him. I didn’t ask if he knew Jesus. Maybe I slipped up. But I got him to point B, even if it was a liquor store.
You can’t know where everything — or everyone — goes. But you can do the work in front of you.
Because if you’ve known deep pain, and have seen it defeated in simple ways — perhaps by a jazz band outside the metro — you don’t think about the end point. Not always.
The point, overall, is presence. Beyond an email that cripples, or a poverty that feels too steep. When deep joy meets deep pain, it doesn’t care — it acts.
Because if Keith would’ve died on the way to the liquor store, or I had gotten hit by a car as I pushed him there, he would’ve known one thing: not that I was enabling him to drink more, but that I was with him.
Every noble and saving act begins when someone decides to walk with you, whether it’s Jesus or your grandmother, your brother or your teacher. The addict doesn’t get clean by being ignored. The child doesn’t get saved by a distracted social worker.
People see darkness — poverty, lack of education, access, or opportunity, depression, and pain — and they choose either to let light in, or not. And to bring that holy, redemptive light into the caves of our own self-deception is difficult and uncomfortable.
But Christ tears through the veils we wear; He defeats darkness. God works mightily through each of us.
A jazz band didn’t redeem me, but it did provide a redemptive moment: a place where I came face to face with the wholly freeing, just, and merciful God.
And in the same way, I didn’t save Keith. I met him and I looked him in the eye. I pushed that damn wheelchair up the hill and across the street. I offered a redemptive moment, and I shook his hand. For those minutes, he was known and seen.
With a God like ours, all you need is a moment — or maybe a melody.
Photo (Flickr CC) by philippe leroyer.
