Eye Contact With Jesus
July-August 2013
One ordinary afternoon, I pulled up to a stoplight—an ordinary mom driving an ordinary minivan with three small children chattering unintelligibly in the back. Beside our minivan stood a man in a camouflage jacket holding a cardboard sign that read, HOMELESS—HUNGRY—ANYTHING HELPS.
At moments like these, the wisdom of the world wrestles with the wisdom of Christ. You’re not supposed to give beggars money, because they might use it to buy drugs; instead, you’re supposed to support the shelters that care for them. Still, I can’t escape the conviction that when Christ said, “Whatever you did for the least of these” (Matthew 25:40), he didn’t intend for us to just scatter our largesse from a safe distance. He meant for us to take a risk and look into his face, person to person.
Yet we hardly ever do. We stare straight ahead and pretend we don’t even see them, because eye contact with a beggar is a signal that we’re ready to open our wallets.