There are times when I’m abruptly confronted with my own stark depravity, and it catches me off-guard, because I’m usually convinced that I’m a nicer person than I really am. I find that I’m mostly a stranger and my own worse roommate inside the drafty apartment of this body, sloppy, noisy, inconsiderate, leaving a trail of wet towels and dirty bowls and all the lights on expecting someone else to pay the electric and grocery bills.
I am the one who says to my neighbor, Make yourself at home, and gets irriated when they do. I simultaneously feel the immense weight of having more than I need and the slight sting of loss when I carve out a portion to share and it is not received in my particular way. Or it is gobbled up too quickly. And sometimes they want seconds, and that means no leftovers for us, ourselves, later. Maybe I really don’t mean it when I say, Let me know if you need anything. I want to mean it.
Did that certain Samaritan leave a forwarding address for the injured man to find when he was well enough? Were the Levite’s dreams ever troubled with images of a bruised and bloodied man, crumpled in the dirt, getting smaller and smaller in his rearview mirror until he disappeared?
How generous and kind God is to us as we live in this place he built with His own bare hands, still providing all the food and light, and we keep leaving our stuff everywhere, taking more than we need, thinking ungracious thoughts about our neighbors, having no common decency but common expectancy, common complacency, common bankruptcy.
Yet He watches over me at night as I rest in this borrowed bed. He so delights in me that He breaks into song and smiles when the birds sing along. He tucks me in with spectacular sunsets and turns on the stars and the moon so I don’t get scared. He says He’ll stay.
I walk into the kitchen and find the load of towels I forgot, I forgot, to take from the drier last night, folded in halves, stacked like a sandstone mountain on the diningroom table where we shared a meal just hours before. I wince, gazing for a long moment at the mirror God held up to my heart. Sorry, God. I feel His smile and nod and He keeps singing. I refold the towels into tight thirds and shake open my heart and hands a little wider.