Thought for the Week: An encounter
Connie Hazell reflects on an encounter
‘Are you open to new light from whatever source it may come?’
Advices & queries 7
The Friend had arrived on a recent Thursday morning, and I had read the letters page over breakfast. A phrase in one of the letters stayed with me: it was ‘The Light of Christ is in us all’. What a claim! I pondered this during the morning. Is this our conscience or our better selves? Is this compassion, kindness, consideration? Is this the same as ‘seeing that of God in everyone?’ or more of a personal challenge to let the Light of Christ illumine our way, sometimes along unfamiliar paths. Is it a challenge to love the unlovable and move out of our comfort zone, to use a popular phrase?
I went shopping in the afternoon. It was hot and I had bought more than I had intended. So, laden down, tired and hot, and faced with a walk once off the bus, I decided to ring for a taxi. The taxi arrived with a woman driver, who beckoned to a little woman standing outside the supermarket who was selling The Big Issue. The woman taxi driver gave her some money. As we drove off the driver explained that, as well as buying The Big Issue regularly, she gave the woman money whenever she was in the vicinity. This was usually about three times a week. The driver knew the seller’s name, where she lived and where she had come from. The seller, she said, was far from well and was a lot younger than she looked.
The taxi driver sometimes gave the woman food for her daughter, who was also often ill. I was impressed by her kindness and said so. She seemed surprised. Well, we never know what might happen to us, she said: ‘If I had an accident and couldn’t work, so couldn’t pay the mortgage, I would be thankful for friends, but at least I would be in my own country.’
This encounter came when in previous weeks I had heard several normally kindly people doubt the necessity for food banks and denigrate immigrants en masse, seeing them as a problem rather than as human beings.
In the Bible story of Zacchaeus – who was not only an unpopular tax gatherer but probably a dishonest one at that – it tells how he climbed a tree in order to get a better view of the wandering preacher everyone was talking about. Zacchaeus was astonished to be invited to take tea with Jesus, at which we are told ‘the crowd grumbled’. Elsewhere in the gospel narrative (Matthew 5:47) we see the words ‘Why should God reward you if you love only the people who love you? … and if you speak only to friends, have you done anything out of the ordinary?’
I would like to have known if my taxi driver belonged to a church or faith group, but it was of no consequence. I had really experienced the Light of Christ in her that day.
A few days later, on local radio, I heard a listener say how he had been greeted by a stranger with the words ‘blessings on your day’. Well, blessings had certainly come on the day of my encounter – to the seller of The Big Issue and to me.
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