The stranger next to you

It was ten degrees in Chicago, November 1986. A twenty-two-year-old walked through the cold. 

He'd graduated college not long before, and grief had followed him there. His father and one of his brothers had died in a plane crash a few years earlier. He'd kept going to church for a while out of habit, but somewhere along the way his faith had quietly given out. 

By graduation he called himself an atheist, and he wore it like an identity. It felt smart. Serious. He'd spent plenty of college getting high and reading, until the pot started getting in the way of the books, so he gave up the pot and kept the books.

Now he had a job in the city, and grief without anywhere to put it. 

On the street that freezing day, someone from the Gideons handed him a small green New Testament. It was so cold the pages had frozen shut. He had to knock it against his knee to crack it open. 

In the back there was a list of verses for what you're carrying. Grief. Fear. Doubt. His eye landed on "anxiety," and it pointed him to the Sermon on the Mount. He read about birds who don't store up grain and still eat, about wildflowers dressed better than kings, about a Father who already knows what you need before you ask. He hadn't expected it to land. But it did, plainly, like it had been written for a specific twenty-two-year-old on a specific cold morning. 

Not long after, he lost the book. 

The next week, riding the bus to work, he noticed the woman next to him reading a different edition of the New Testament. He mentioned that he used to have one and had lost it. She held hers out and told him to keep it. 

He never learned her name. But he kept her Bible, her handwriting still in the margins, and forty years later he still carries it. That twenty-two-year-old was Stephen Colbert. Neither of them knew who he'd become. They just knew who was in front of them. 

She didn't know he'd spend the next forty years carrying that book with him, or that he'd end up in front of millions of people most nights of the week. She just saw a guy who'd lost something and she could do something about it. That was the whole decision. 

Most of the time, we never know how we impacted someone's life. We don't find out who the waiter becomes, or the guy in line, or the kid who won't make eye contact. 

Sometimes we don't know who we're talking to. 

It could change their life. It might change ours, too. 

Peace, 
Travis Segar 
​Pastor for Care and Community.