I went outside the other day to uncover the plants after the latest freeze. In case you don’t know, when a drastic dip in the temperature is predicted, residents of the deep South are warned about protecting the four p’s. That means people, pets, plants, and pipes. Protecting plants usually involves running out the night of the freeze and draping cloths over vulnerable vegetation, with the result that the yard and the neighborhood are filled with ghostly shapes.
Anyhow, as I was piling the cloths one by one over my arm, a man on a bicycle stopped. He had a plastic crate strapped to the back of the bike and the indefinable look about him that those who have been homeless for a long time seem to acquire. We began chatting amiably about the plants and the weather. Then the conversation shifted.
“Night before last I went over to Butler Plaza,” he began.
Butler Plaza is a huge strip mall emblematic of urban sprawl.
“About two o’clock,” he continued, “I went to sleep under a bush.”
That was the night it stormed and turned frigid.
“Now I have this cold.”
“No wonder,” I said.
“I’m on my way to get some cough medicine.”
There was a pause.
“I live in a tent in the woods, and I have blankets there.”
“But you didn’t have any at Butler Plaza,” I added reasonably. Perhaps I did him an injustice, but I imagined him not so much deciding it would be convenient to spend the night under a bush, but passing out there, dead drunk, with a storm coming on and no cover.
Once more he turned the conversation to the plants. “Maybe you should leave them covered tonight,” he suggested.
“It’s not supposed to freeze tonight. But,” I added, “take care of yourself. You’re more important than the plants.”
“I’m just a bum.”
“No, no, no,” I stammered, not knowing what else to say.
The conversation soon drew to a close, and off he rode.
When I told Sr. Elizabeth about his saying he was just a bum, she replied, without a moment’s hesitation, “Beloved of God.”
That is what I should have said to him, of course. I should have told him the truth. You are not a bum. You are beloved of God.
When you stop to pass the time of day with someone working in the garden, you are beloved of God. When you show concern for the living things in the garden, you are beloved of God. And when you drink yourself blind and pass out under a bush at the mall, you are, still and always, beloved of God.
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.
(1 John 3:1)