Beggars.

So we were at Macca's ( just trying to keep warm - but we bought a packet of fries between the half a dozen of us.)

We were reading some bible after the prayer events in the last post. We were just talking about people who ask for money, wondering how to treat them, how to react and relate.

A guy came in and asked us for money. "His grandma died two weeks ago, he was kicked out of that place and needed food." When we offered to buy food, the story changed to needing rent money. There were holes everywhere in his story, and while his clothes looked newish... he did smell a lot.

anyway... it is just so hard sometimes to know how to be Christlike here... Here was a guy lieing to us, quite regularly claiming he "knew God and Jesus". He had some crazy ideas about ghosts, aliens and so on, seemed like he wasn't all there.

In the end I said I would give him $5 if he heard me out. I told him his story was barely believeable but that we did want to be compassionate because God has showed his love to us.
We dialogued about God and Jesus and so on, he knew nothing really but had no shortage of things to say anyway. I tried to get the gospel in but it was pretty hard and intermittent. In the end we left it that we were giving him money because God loves us. He walked away with $15 but I wonder whether we just just shortchanged Christ.

Jesus never had money really and so the people coming to him had different motives it would seem. Hard to say, I just knew Jesus would have known the perfect response and reaction to this guy, whilst I felt totally inadequate to know how to handle him.

We all prayed for him after he left... God the rest is up to you. We hope a nice aftertaste remains in this guy after his brush with us.

Reading Isaiah today, in the early chapters it seems some of the crowning signs of depravity within their society (in God's eyes) were their neglet of the fatherless and the widow.

Our society is easily wotrthy to recieve the same rebuke, but God's voice wasn't super clear with this guy, just didn't know how to penetrate the christian rhetoric he has learned in the traps. Didn't know what to believe or how to actually say something that he heard. We'd be utterly bewildered if we couldn't pray.