Son of Encouragement
He met me close to a bus stop in uptown.
Work in my folder with various data sheets distracted me from looking directly at him as I answered his question with caution. After all, a girl should be alert at all times.
I let him believe without correction that my name was Kat and that I was graduated from high school. The latter was at least true. This stranger asked me about college, since he said I seemed “highly intellectual”, and here I said maybe I would go into teaching or get a master’s degree in a vague English field, that perhaps I would look into attending Fullerton. My grade point average was sought, and as usual I got the thrill of impressing a person with it.
From there I stopped working and closed my books. The more I focused on the man talking to me in a quite open and honest way, the more I became intrigued by his conversation, his relating to me in a bold and fluent manner which was consistent with everything I could gather about him from ten minutes of acquaintance.
He had gone to high school near uptown, and he told me about his encouragements to his friends throughout, his so-called “gift of gab”. His words rung true with his manner which, again, was so openly human as to be pure from deception.
I saw that this random meeting was good. I had plans and agendas for the day, but this was human engagement so rare as to be irreplaceable if I were to excuse myself and walk away. I am glad I didn’t.
There was something supernaturally good about Isaac. I have only met a dozen or so people in whom I saw this straight away. He spoke broadly, turning fluently from one facet of his life to the next. This man wove a tapestry of his popularity in high school, his friends with bad habits after, his orphaned childhood, having lost his mother to cancer at age ten and never really known his father; he spoke about his gift for inspiring in others that which they could not in themselves. In this way, he gave confidence and boldness to do what was difficult, to succeed.
A belief in a God up above was acknowledged and reciprocated when I nodded. You feel me? he asked. He spoke, too, about track and field. I just began seeing his appearance, as I had only noticed before seeing a slightly defined musculature that he was a man and that his account was telling of life as it is, and one not to be missed.
Things got more amazing when he told me he grew up n a rough neighborhood – the “ghetto”, he called it – and how he had been mistaken for a gang member.
One day he was shot thirteen times.
He acknowledged hidden marks, but showed me the appropriate scars: on his legs, through his forearm, one that the hospital said should have pierced his heart but went up through his skin instead. I found myself guided to the healed fracture behind his ear where a hollow-point bullet had not pierced his skull. God wanted me, this guy, for a purpose, he said. You feel me? he asked, not for the first time.
Isaac is 32 years old. He still thinks I am 18, I am fairly certain. Our appearances make both of us look younger than we really are. I found myself putting away my buzzing messages and turning my full gaze on him, into the earnest perspective of his tale of encouragement, and as I was about to find out, humility.
Humble: he defined the word as a living concept, unlike the stale, over-processed dictionary definition.
Isaac has this idea that humility is actually putting down your own agenda, of setting aside pride for some greater purpose.
Pride lurks in the everyday comparisons and obsessions preoccupying humanity: in cars, homes, jobs, money, spouses. Society wants us to look good on paper, he said. The enemy has twisted the notion of talent into personal gain and an envious struggle for status.
Isaac said that he used to be defined by his status, his popularity, his gift of inspiring, but that now he knows God gave him and every person their own gifts and let them choose how to use those in this lifetime. Some use their talents for the purpose of obtaining Lamborghinis. He’s driven one in his youth.
But set God first, he said, and everything else will follow. Then with a smile he said, Yeah, you’ll get to drive that Lamborghini.
His friend walked over and interrupted for a bit. When the friend walked away, Isaac talked about how these friends are still stuck with the misconception that they know him from before. They talk buddy-smack with him and he is friendly and kind to them – but they don’t understand yet that he does not do the things they do. Sure, he has a couple of tattoos and he has a warm slang vernacular expertly peppered with intelligent and descriptive vocabulary of the university kind, although his only advanced learning is from books, his college the “ghetto” where he’s lived.
Isaac comes around again to the gifts he is using rightly in this moment, the encouragement God has lit in him to be a positive feature in the lives of those around him. All the gifts people have been given originate with God, everyone from actors to athletes, geniuses to authorities. There was that athlete who got robbed at gunpoint in South America, he said, and I remember Ryan Lochte* is that athlete.
It doesn’t matter how talented he is – his gifts could not protect him.
Nor can ours. Talent and skill cannot save us, but a choice to use them to follow God, that will draw us into a purpose expanding beyond our lifetimes.
I’m just waiting for Christ, man, Isaac says.
My priorities and actions become illuminated in this moment. I am beginning to see the reaches of what he means, because I sense it, too.
He talked to me for a while longer, a time when he relates teaching and listening skills as complimentary. To my surprise, yet true to his gift for encouragement, he said I might have a gift of gab, too, in my own way.
And then he asked me what I was thinking through, and I said he should be called Barnabas, or son of encouragement, like the man who became Paul’s friend. He talked about how Paul was a great leader, but called the Lord an inferior title in the Greek language: lord in lowercase. That’s great, Isaac said, but Paul still had to learn who he was talking to, so Paul was without sight for a couple of days to see that this was not just any lord.
We talked more, and then his friends and my friend called us. I apologized for having to go. He asked my name again, and I told him my nickname, which isn't Kat. We shook hands, and I thanked him for using the gift given to him.
See you some other day, I said.
You, too, definitely, he said.
And we both meant it.
Lately during reading I had been directed to pay attention to the word “testimony.” My focus leaned into the understanding that testimony was a true story, a faithful rendition of what has happened.
I could not be more specific than that: was it my own testimony that I should work on? What kind of testimony is effective? Was I supposed to pay attention to the biblical testimony of many men, or a certain one?
Truly, purpose and direction found me through a sidewalk encourager’s testimony in little over an hour. I think Jesus did speak in a “ghetto” accent. If the man I met has been transformed by Christ’s presence in his life, then hell doesn’t stand a chance.
*Update as of 8/18/16: The news is that Lochte may or may not have been robbed, but we spoke about what we knew at the time.
