Pastor Bernie Quinn

Proverbs 14:31 (NLT)
"Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who help the poor honor him."

When I look into the face of poverty there is something inside of me that compels me to act. It has not always been this way. For a long time, most of my life really, I just didn’t care. It’s not that I’m a terrible cold hearted person (quiet the contrary, most people who know me consider me to be a rather nice guy!) It’s just that caring about the poor was never “my thing”. It’s funny though, how things can sneak up on you in life, and how some things can change.

I’ll never forget the very first time I genuinely cared about someone living in poverty. It was 14 summers ago. I was standing in front of a casino on the boardwalk of Atlantic City; an unusual place for a pastor to be, I admit. My wife and I didn’t gamble, but we lived less than two hours away from Atlantic City and on this particular weekend we found ourselves “entertaining” childhood friends who just had to see a “real casino”. Maybe fancy boardwalks and glitzy casinos don’t thrill you too much, but for kids growing up in a rural town that has more bovine than people, this was really something special.

It was here, amidst the glitter and sirens of the one armed bandits that I saw something else we didn’t have in our hometown: street people. They were pretty much everywhere, pushing their shopping carts, sleeping on the benches, drinking out of paper sacks, talking to themselves, and begging. Begging was the hardest to deal with because sometimes you just can’t look the other away. Some of these people had their routine down to a science: step in front of you, eye contact, a dirty hand stretched out, “spare some change”? I found it got easier to say no as the day wore on, especially after “one of them” ran into the casino with the two quarters received from the kind soul in front of us. I no longer felt bad saying no. In a way, I reasoned that saying “no” was actually helping them. “No, No, No!” I got good at saying it, my conscience had been set free! Free until the “cookie” incident.

You see, all this the walking had made my friend hungry and so he bought himself a big bag of cookies from a street vendor. Now this was no ordinary bag of cookies, oh no, this was the ninety nine cent, two hundred and fifty count, sugar cookie, super bag. Soon we were all eating cookies, handfuls and handfuls of the sweetest (and cheapest) sugar cookies Atlantic City had to offer. So there we were, walking along in our sugar cookie bliss, and then it happened, one of “them” changed the rules: he stepped in front of us, made eye contact, stretched out a dirty hand, and asked, “spare a… cookie?" Before I could speak, before I could think or reason, before I could look away, walk away, run away, in an instant it happened. My friend, with a mouth full of cookies, looked right at him and said “I have your cookie right here” and proceeded to spit it on the ground in front of him. My friend laughed and the “beggar” walked away. I tried to laugh too, I guess for the sake of my friend, but I think he knew it wasn’t a real laugh. The feeling I had wasn’t joy and it stayed with me the rest of that day and into the night. The more I thought about what happened, the more I saw the beggar’s leathered and wrinkled face, dirty hand still stretched out, and a pile of chewed up cookies on the ground.

I wanted to go back, give him my money, the cookies, a warm meal, and say “I’m sorry”. But you know, sometimes there’s no going back. Sometimes things just happen that you can’t undo. And that’s the thing with God, sometimes he brings you to the place of no going back so that you never will go back. Like I said, I’ll never forget the very first time I cared.