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On Sunday late afternoon I was in the sanctuary getting ready to begin rehearsal for the youth band. Sunday night was our big end of the school year/beginning of summer worship night that we had been planning for a while now. Just as we were getting ready to start rehearsal a man walked into the sanctuary and down to the stage.
I turned around and the man came up to me and asked “Would it be possible for someone to pray with me for a minute?” I said I’d pray with him and told the band to start playing through the first song. We went out into the narthex to talk and pray. We sat down in a couple of chairs and he began telling me his story. His name was Randall.
***First of all, I often have trouble fully trusting people that walk in to the church asking for something. The cynical side of me is always wondering what they REALLY need and what they are trying to scam from us because we’re a church. Nonetheless, we began to talk and he told me his story.***
Randall was a 7th generation firefighter. He was from Manhattan NYC. On September 11, 2001 Randall and his father were responders to the attacks on the World Trade Center. They were in the buildings as they collapsed and were trapped for several hours before Randall got out. Randall’s father was not so lucky, months later they confirmed that a jaw bone and femur found in the rubble were his father’s.
Since then Randall continued to be a firefighter in NYC until he developed lung cancer from inhaling all of the fumes and particles in the air on 9/11/2001. Since then he has gone from 235lbs down to 130lbs and looked like a skeleton. The cancer has since spread to his intestines, of which he has had parts of removed. Before he came to our church he spent over 40 days in a cancer treatment facility before being released this last Friday. He spent the next two days walking around the city looking for someone to help him or find somewhere to stay.
Randall was on his way home from a trip to Utah back to NYC when he had a health episode and found himself stuck in Indianapolis. The government had turned him down for financial aid and he claimed that multiple churches had turned him away because “They just couldn’t afford to help every single person that came through their doors.”
After hearing a few stories of the struggles he’d endured since developing cancer and the lack of help from the Church and the government I told him I would find a way to get him somewhere to stay, even if just for one night. I asked our youth director to call our associate pastor to see if he had any ideas while I continued to listen to Randall talk. Our associate pastor approved putting Randall up in a hotel for the evening.
I then took Randall to Marsh grocery store to get him a few things to eat. His diet is VERY restrictive because of the surgery he’s had on his intestines. He can’t hardly eat any solid food at all. I then took him to a local hotel and got him a room for the night.
Randall had obviously been burnt by the Church many times and seemed honestly shocked at the hospitality of our church. He couldn’t believe we would just go and get him a room at a hotel and a meal for the night.
My first instinct is not to trust people when they come looking for a handout. Honestly, Randall wasn’t looking for a handout. He was just looking for a prayer and an ear to listen to him pour his heart out about the unimaginably hard life he’s had, especially over the last ten years.
As I was listening to him speak about the things he’s been through, Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:40 kept coming to mind, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” I kept thinking that it’s not really my place to say his story is true or not. He was clearly in physical pain and I saw the long line of staples in his abdomen where he had recently had surgery. Assuming his stories were true he wasn’t even “the least of these”…he was a hero! He risked his life in the World Trade Centers on September 11, 2001 and when he needed people the most they had consistently failed him over and over.
I know as a church staff, or even just people in general, it can be our first thought when someone like this approaches us for help to think about what the “cost” of helping them is. Do we have enough money? If we make this a habit to help everyone will we go bankrupt? Do we have time to help these people? Honestly, I can’t picture Jesus ever saying “well I just don’t have the money to help every single person that walks through my door.”
I’m coming up on the end of my first year in full time ministry. Maybe I’m still a little naive. I’d like to think that our job as the Church is to help any and all people selflessly, regardless of how much it costs us financially or otherwise.
Jesus follows up his statement about those that help the least of these with this, “Truly I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:45).
It broke my heart that this guy had to walk from near downtown Indianapolis to the far north east side before he found a church that didn’t turn him away.
Randall was given two to four months to live by doctors but told me he just felt like he’d be with Jesus far sooner than two months.
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