A couple weeks ago I mentioned in this column that I had been unpleasantly surprised to find a naked man standing in my carport one morning. He was apparently stoned out of his gourd and barely able to stand up, but he was otherwise non-threatening and just asked me repeatedly to “please give me a ride to my home.”
I called the police and he left walking down the street. With the exception of police cruisers driving back and forth on all the nearby roads for the rest of the day, the incident seemed to be over with fairly quickly.
Except it wasn’t.
I’ve thought about the nekkid dude in my yard a lot since then. Maybe if I’d given the him a ride home that day he wouldn’t have been riding around in my head all this time.
Pretty soon after that, it seems like all the preachers and pastors around me started preaching on James 2:15-17.
“Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
When they weren’t preaching on James, they seemed to be honed in on Hebrews 13:1-3.
“Continue in brotherly love. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those in prison as if you were bound with them, and those who are mistreated as if you were suffering with them.”
When my wife proofread the Nekkid Dude article, even she asked me, “Why didn’t you just give the guy a ride?”
My only answer was that he caught me off guard and that made me automatically defensive.
Maybe if he had stayed around long enough I might have seen that he was not a threat. Maybe I could have gotten him some clothes or a blanket. Maybe I could have given him a ride to his home like he asked.
Heck, we might have become best buddies if I’d given him enough time and help — but I wasn’t about to let him hang around my home and family, naked and mentally impaired, long enough for me to think up a better idea than telling him to “get off my lawn.”
Almost all of the people that I have told about this say they would have shot him as soon as they saw him. Most of them even used prolonged strings of colorful epithets.
While I haven’t really agonized much over the way this turned out, I have thought about it a good bit. Eventually I realized maybe that nekkid dude needed a different kind of help more than he needed to be taken home to his same old screwed-up situation. Maybe the police were the best folks most equipped to get him the sort of help he really needed.
Maybe God actually sent nekkid dude to me that day because I was the only guy around that would help him get the sort of help he needed instead of shooting him.
Maybe God kept me from thinking straight and fast that day to keep me from beating him up or shooting him, so the guy could get the sort of help he needed.
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