Homeless Footsteps on an American bridge

All he wanted was fifteen cents.

Earlier in the day, I had decided that I was going to purposively walk the streets that evening in search of a homeless guy.

Part of it was because I wanted someone to talk to and I think the other part was that I wanted to feel good about myself. It was by chance that around sunset I crossed paths with Danny on the Douglas St. Bridge.

He carried a wooden cane and limped with old age. Looking in his face I could tell that he was somewhere in his sixties, but ripe with whit. I think that I secretly wanted to walk by Danny.

Oftentimes we search for things in life and then once we’re given those things, we seize up with fear and don’t know how to act.

Sometimes that’s how it is when I want to talk to homeless people.

I had seen Danny around before and his reputation preceded him — he was notorious for asking passersby for fifteen cents.

I’m not sure if he had perfected begging, that he had figured out that you don’t ask a complete stranger for five bucks.

If you work innocent givers little by little, they’re probably more likely to dish out money. At least that’s what I’m assuming his logic was.

It was legendary and had worked thousands of times before for Danny, evidenced by the rattle of change in his pocket.

In crossing paths on the bridge, we passed each other and both kind of slowed down. I knew, without a doubt, that he was going to ask me for money.

He subtly turned to the side a little, stuck out his arm to point at me and asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have fifteen cents, would ya?”

“Maybe,” I said as I dug through my pocket. I knew Danny because of my work with the homeless, but he didn’t know me.

“What do you need fifteen cents for?”

“Well, I want to buy a cup of coffee at McDonald’s,” he said.

“Doesn’t a cup of coffee cost more than fifteen cents though?”

He smiled at me with a gentle old smile and simply said, “I got a pocket full of change.”

I only had a quarter so I gave it to him. He thanked me properly and continued on his way, all of the way to the “golden arches.”

Because I have trust issues and wanted to test his integrity, I had followed him to see if he was really going to get coffee. And sure enough, he stood at the counter and walked away with a cup of brew.

I think we too frequently misconstrue mission work.

We think mission work has to be something grand and glorious, when in fact it’s usually the little things that amount to the big things and the big things that ultimately resolve themselves to small ones.

Finding significant work to do in the Kingdom doesn’t mean we have to hop on an airplane, fly 18 hours to Africa, and hold malnourished kids in a remote village.

The “big vision” of mission work is to see God’s Kingdom manifest itself, and it’s oftentimes birthed through simple and random acts of love — like giving a homeless stranger a quarter.

Serving God all over the world is well worth the experience, but it can also be one of those things that is just that — nothing more than an experience.

Does it change you? Does it create more opportunities for you and others to serve?

And it’s not that you judge a successful mission experience by whether or not it changed you — ultimately it’s not about you; however we should ask ourselves whether we loved and if we loved like Jesus.

It was a few weeks later when I was sitting outside of a coffee shop in downtown when I saw Danny hobbling by. He was walking from person to person asking for spare change.

I knew it was only a matter of minutes before he found his way over to me.

“How are you, Danny?” I asked.

Startled, he stared at me intently before staring into the sunset and asking, “do I know you from somewhere?”

“I met you a few weeks ago on the bridge, remember?”

“Sure,” he said unconvinced. “Do you have fifteen cents?”