by Pastor Dan Baumgartner

Everyone who walked into the lower Queen Anne Starbucks noticed him instantly. He was maybe fifty years old, but who can really tell when the skin is so weather-beaten it may never recover, and the hair is so long and matted with grease? He sat just to the right of the main door at a small table with two chairs. And though the chair opposite him was as empty as a long-abandoned car at the side of a country road, he was having a very animated conversation. Perhaps it was with someone we just couldn’t see. If so, I hope they were a good listener, because he had an awful lot to say.

I’ve been around people on the streets quite a bit, but it was still a jolt to realize I was thinking of him as something less than a person. I remembered with some shame that, disturbed or drugged as he was, he belongs. He is the son of some mother who may be broken-hearted that her smooth-cheeked, clean-haired little boy whom she named has become a nameless man on the street. He is a father’s son, a father perhaps long dead or living a separate life. I wonder if his dad didn’t know what to do about the boy who was at once an embarrassment, a broken hope—and still his. This now grown man belongs to someone, or at least he once did.

Whatever the cause, he is broken into pieces like an egg dropped on a sidewalk. Little of his real self remains. He could no more care for himself than the chair that he occupied could make a speech. He will need help the rest of his days, a safe place to carry on the urgent conversations with the air and empty space, a bed to sleep in, food to eat and somehow, someway a community to enfold him, a people to belong to.

I don’t know when, how or if that can happen. And as I looked at him jabbering away, I confess that I wondered if he was so far gone it didn’t matter. Where is the image of God? At least that’s what the calloused part of me thought. As I sat musing, Starbucks Man tottered unsteadily to his feet, picked up the remarkably filthy backpack, slid into a moldy coat and headed for the door, still muttering.

Three paces away, he stopped suddenly and whirled back to his table, knowing he had forgotten something. He picked up the two dirty napkins he had left behind and swept the crumbs off the table. Now satisfied that the table was ready for the next human being who will sit there, he went on his way. Made in God’s image. Broken, needy?

We both were.

We all are.