That's what earnest looks like

He was sitting on the marble ledge of a low window eating something from a paper bag. Above him, neon lights blared atop downtown Atlanta high rises, and in front of him, taxis slogged through gray puddles.

My best friend and I walked past him, at first.

We’d almost reached the revolving glass door of our cozy hotel when Julie said,

“I kind of wanted to talk to him.”

We slowed our pace hesitantly and then stopped.

It wouldn’t have been the first stranger we struck up conversation with on the streets that weekend. We were in the city the first few days of 2012 for a conference about how college students can change the world. Our hotel was about a mile from a conference center that didn’t boast parking spots, but our twice-a-day trek proved to give us a genuine slice of life.

New Year’s Day, we’d met two 14-year-old boys sitting in a park playing renditions of Me Without You songs on guitars. A guitar case lay open on the sidewalk, and we threw some coins into it and requested “In a Sweater Poorly Knit.” They played and sang it, and then told us they were saving up money for a mission trip to Haiti. They’d taken the bus downtown to panhandle because they didn’t have any other transportation or any other feasible way to fund their trip at the time.

We also met a singer – a black woman in her 50s who stood on the sidewalk at dusk, leaning against a stack of suitcases and carpetbags. She sang soulful hymns and old spirituals in an angelic, radio-quality voice that gave me goose bumps. At first, we thought she was homeless because she was collecting money. But when she finished singing, she told us she was the pastor of a church, and singing on the street was a way she collected money for poor families in her congregation.

So after we passed the man that last night of the conference, we stood there and looked at each other, deciding what to do.

We’d just gotten out of the last conference session of the day feeling pretty drenched in information, and I didn’t feel like talking. But the sum of all the teaching we’d heard said ‘there are so many people and places that need help’ – to which I wondered, where should two sophomores living on Bright Futures scholarships start?

We decided to start by backtracking.

We headed back out into the icy drizzle, coats zipped over hoodies and hood drawstrings pulled tight over our heads.

Julie approached the man and said hi. He looked up, startled. The first thing I noticed was his full, wiry gray beard. Actually, that was mostly all I noticed. It was strikingly full and wiry. And he was surrounded by a bulging canvas backpack and some bags of stuff. I just stood at Julie’s elbow, kind of at a loss for words. But she was doing OK.

She made some small talk with the man – I don’t remember exactly what about – but she introduced us and found out that he’s homeless.  She said because we belong to Jesus, we want to help people.

“Are you cold?” she asked. The man gave an indefinite answer.

“Do you need a coat?”

He shook the lapels of the windbreaker he was wearing and said it was pretty warm, but he could find someone to give it to. Julie took off her black, waterproof North Face jacket and handed it to him. He thanked her, and we prayed with him, and then we started to go.

Julie spun back around.

“Hey, what was your name?”

“Ernest,” he said.

As soon as he’d said his name, I’d thought of the verse in James: “Pure and undefiled religion is this, to visit widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” That verse means God sees earnest faith as doing something for someone who needs it without selfish motivation.

When Ernest told us his name, it kind of felt like God was looking at Julie and saying “This is what earnest looks like.”

As we walked back to the hotel, I smiled because it seemed God had answered my question about how to change the world. Sometimes it looks like talking to people you come across, and sometimes it looks like praying with people, and sometimes it looks like giving coats away.