It used to be that if you were going to see people begging in Calgary, you had to be Downtown. That isn’t the case anymore. There’s the young guy with his cardboard identity of “Homeless because of PTSD” sitting outside Superstore begging for change while playing on his smartphone. There’s another sitting outside the bookstore with his dog in a faded pile of blankets. His shift coincides with that of the veiled woman at the nearby intersection making the rounds of drivers’s windows before the light changes. A bag of fresh buns—given in place of money—lies discarded and unopened on the side of the road.
Maybe this proliferation of begging—this symptom of social sickness—is a result of the economic downturn that our province has endured. Maybe it is part of a crisis of mental illness and addiction. Or, perhaps our culture is merely living out the downstream physical consequences of our spiritual bankruptcy. A family friend—no stranger to addiction and psychological difficulties—once poetically referred to these denizens of the streets, as ‘the Faded People’.
I confess, sympathy is not the predominant emotion I feel when I see the guy with his sign and his smartphone, or when I see someone else’s gift of groceries disdained and trampled. It is more like an unholy irritation at the attempted emotional manipulation; at being asked to participate in whatever dysfunction is being perpetuated.
I realized the other morning, though—in a flash of revelation—how often I am like one of the faded people to God. I go about my days looking to feed my addiction to pride and my own opinions. Always seeking the next distraction that will make me feel good for the present. I approach God with a hand extended for a coin—a pittance— instead of surrendering all so that He can transform my life of rags. I hold up a tattered sign bearing an identity meant to invoke pity in order to get what I want. I sit in the faded remnants of better days and resent it when God doesn’t feed my unhealthy habits by answering my sickly prayers.
I need my very desires to be transformed. The Bible tells us that we are made in the image of God—an astounding statement. It implies that our very freedom of will is a shadow of God’s own freedom of will. We cannot be made to change. We must choose it for ourselves. We must choose the greater joy of being abandoned to God’s perfect will over the lesser comfort of having our own way for the moment.
