Nowhere Left to Go

 

Nowhere Left to Go

(“Jesus looked at his followers and said, ‘Great blessings belong to you who are poor. God’s kingdom belongs to you.’” Luke 6:20)

It takes only one gaze, one long and expansive glance
from the king of heaven, the lord of earth,
to bring the shadow people into their proper light.

He used to sleep underneath the bridge. Everyone knew it.
There are no secrets in a hamlet edged up against the river.
He had no car. Walked the bridge to the island where he
lived in a workshop his grandfather left him when he died.
It did not belong to him, but to his family far out of state.
The evicted him, he filled his crates, packed a leaky travel trailer
and pushed it to a storage area for safe keeping. Stretching tarps
across the roof and every corner the bungee cords groaned as
the winds ballooned the blue and camouflage waterproofing when
the winter storms blew fierce.

He could not live in it: storage only.

He cursed when he got angry. Ok, he cursed a lot. He had a motor
scooter he used to ride to town until it broke down. A bicycle replaced
it and worked just fine until the rims and gears wore out with rust.
Then his job fell through and could no longer pay cash only.
For the last two years he had fought to find a way out of the
shivering dark and lonely.

I gave him rides to the food banks when I could. We drove to
the storage lot, unlocked the flimsy trailer door and put the bags
in cupboards and counters, but mostly on the floor.

Nowhere to go when the rains came, I put him up in a storage shed
fifty feet from the door of the church. He found a corner between
manger scenes and lawn mowers and slept with his head on the
lower shelf with canning jars on either side. It was not easy. He was
not tidy. And it was only temporary we knew.

But some of the leaders blew their stack to think a vagrant, a
known drug user, (actually, they would say, it didn’t matter anyway)
and said insisted he had to be out by the end of the day.

Nowhere left to go, and with empty suggestions from the evictors,
he cursed at me, and cursed again. I had let him down, he had been
my friend.

And now, two years later I cannot find him, I do not know where he’s been.

I often wonder why my brothers would not receive someone that Jesus said
was a blessing.