Sometimes, I'm sure people wonder why I bother with him, what it is that has sealed our friendship, how ridiculous it was for me to invite him over to my birthday party as a guest performer. Do we not know, that it is the poor, the hungry and the lonely who have the most to teach us? He has blessed me more than I have blessed him.
Once upon a time, I was angry with and ambivalent towards 'people like him', people who litter our streets 'feigning' poverty, asking for money. It was only when God brought me down to his feet that my eyes were opened to his world. Grandpa Zhou had his pride, and henceforth came his words full of indignance. But his family has left him, he walks with a permanent limp, he is skin and bones and smelly because he doesn't want to waste soap. He sits by the train station with a rusty harmonica and a dirty coin box day after day- it is not the boredom which kills him, but the loneliness.
Why doesn't he just get a job? Have you, like me, been guilty of thinking that of someone else too?
What poor judges we are. And I promised myself never to walk past another busker/ tissue-seller by without asking if he/she had had a meal, or if he would like one.
It is not hunger that kills. It is loneliness.
Another blind man sits on the overhead bridge opposite our General Hospital. He was just as hostile to me at first as Grandpa Zhou was at the beginning. "Do you think I like to be bad-tempered? Don't you know how it feels like to be blind? You will never know."
We shall never know, indeed.
Esther is a lady whose path I crossed because she was smiling so beautifully in her wheelchair on a train one day. I smiled back. That was all I did. And she gave me a handcrafted balloon that day. I met her at 2 different locations 2 other times when she was selling tissue, and stopped to talk. I gave her my number in case she ever needed anything. Less than a month ago, she called me to invite me to a dinner gathering at her friend's place where a special speaker had been invited. I went.
I was blessed. Esther has given me 2 balloons, a dinner invitation and a smile which melts into my soul that sings, oh how it sings of the goodness of God in her life. She smiles, even though she is in a wheelchair. Her quiet, permeating joy is utterly infectious.
So who has blessed who more?
Once, I was hurt. I was hurt by a man (or maybe a boy) who liked me enough to want to offer Grandpa Zhou and I a lift to his house from the train station to deliver some groceries to him. Grandpa Zhou has no one to depend on, his medical fees are a constant woe (until of late when one of you donated your precious savings to him). What he needs- more than food or a coin thrown into his tattered box to salve one's conscience, is someone to accord him the dignity a man deserves. I was hurt that night when he, my supposed knight, laid out a piece of linen on his car upholstery so that Grandpa Zhou wouldn't leave a stain or smell in his car. I asked him about it- he was sheepish answering me. That piece of linen was Intolerable to me. It was degrading. After so many months of pursuit, he had already half-won my heart, but that night, I took it back, and nothing, nothing could change my mind.
It was over, because of a piece of linen.
Today after my run, as I was about to hop into the pool, an anxious mother (my neighbour living one storey below me) came running towards me.
"One minute, do you have one minute?"
Behind her, standing sheepishly was her daughter around my age, from a top junior college in our country. "Oh, my daughter has something to ask you. About entering medical school."
I knew that conversation would take half an hour. I had church to attend soon, so I gave her my number instead.
The Anxious Mother hovered around me patronizingly, and after my swim as I got up to hit the treadmill again in preparation for my upcoming triathlon, she anxiously showed me The Way To the Treadmill as if I were Queen. I wish I could have felt warmer towards her and her daughter, but just last week, my domestic helper had shared with me how hurt she was by this family living downstairs who had often looked right through her even when she greeted them in the lift, or had given her condescending looks.
Why are we respected for our titles, jobs and functions, more than for who we are.
In the public, I am prized because of the potential of my future. In the hospital, I am Phytoplankton, lowest in the food chain, treated with scorn even by nurses sometimes, because of my position. Is it fair.
I am guilty. I have not been perfect. But I'm more ready to turn back now when I walk past, more ready to Stop, more ready to say hello to someone who might not have heard that in ages, because you just never know, when you might meet an Angel in your path.
"Do not forget to entertain strangers,
for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it."
-Hebrews 13:2
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