Somebody’s Grandpa
As I drove down a street near my home last week, I saw him again. He is an older man with long flowing white hair. He walks with a sense of purpose and large plastic bag slung over his shoulder. He always wears a pair of 1980’s vintage acid washed jeans that look like they have not seen a washing machine since new. He wears no shirt but has a torso deeply darkened by the Arizona sun. Even on this mid-December day he was walking shirtless.
We have seen him walking here and there in a four or five mile radius around our home and church, and he has been around for at least fifteen years. He is older now, thinner than fifteen years ago. His hair was once a blondish gray but now flows pure white. I know it has been that long because years ago one of our small children (who is now an adult) was only about ten years old when she peered out the window of our moving Suburban and said, “Daddy, there he goes again! Who is he?”
“We don’t know honey.” my wife answered in my stead.
“Why doesn’t he wear a shirt?” another child chimed in.
“Maybe he doesn’t have one!” the first child answered.
“I saw him once with a shirt” the next voice chimed in from two rows back. When you are driving with a large family in tow, you sometimes forget which one said what.
Another child had been looking at him intently, gauging his age, and finally blurted out with a slight sense of embarrassment, “Just think, he could be SOMEBODY’S grandpa!”
From that time on, that was his name to our family—Somebody’s Grandpa.
We have a large homeless population in our city this time of year. It is now worse than it has ever been before. The exploding opioid crisis combined with the relatively mild temperatures here in the winter months combine for a huge influx. We now see many nameless faces walking our streets, pushing carts, sleeping at bus stops. I really do not know if Somebody’s Grandpa is homeless. He probably has a home nearby and he certainly lives here all year.
That moniker has always reminded me that this vast ocean of humanity swelling all around is really made up of precious individuals. Each one is somebody’s grandpa, father, husband, wife, friend, and always son or daughter, no matter how rich or poor, great or small, known or unknown. Even when all the relatives and friends of this world have forgotten them, the God of heaven knows their every thought and longing. He numbers each hair on each head. Each one is a soul for whom Christ died. The people pushing the shopping carts, the ones who have not washed in a long time, are no filthier before God than I am apart from my Savior, and they are no less precious to Him than I am.
That name, given by my children to a man they have never met, has always reminded me that every person I see is precious to someone—if not on earth then in heaven. I need to remember to see people as He sees them.