impossible faith

"C'mon, Julian! Hurry it up!" Spittle formed on the manager's lip as his red face exerted itself in shouting. "What am I paying you for!" 

At 48 years old, Julian was washing the dishes as fast as he could. His hands were pruned from hours of soaking, his clothes were wet down to his socks, and his back ached from being bent in one spot for hours. But his boss at the restaurant is a hard man. "Let's go! Let's go!" he carried on. "Vamanos!" Julian's hands moved as quickly as they could, his eyes focussed on the task before him.

After bellowing out the orders to move faster, the manager turned to leave the prep. room where Julian sweats for his $8.75 per hour. As soon as the supervisor disappeared around the corner, Julian removed a fork and soiled napkin from a customer's dish that was waiting to be rinsed, and with his wet hand scooped up a palm-full of cold spaghetti, swallowing it whole.

"I don't like to do it," he confessed to me last night, "but it's hard to buy enough food."

"Don't they let you eat something from the kitchen during your break?" I asked.

"Well, they do give us a discount, but it's an expensive restaurant, and I can't afford the food, even with the discount."

"That's rough." I didn't know what to say. 

After a moment of silence between us, Julian blurted out, "But my Lord is so good to me!" I was moved by the fact that he spoke with such familiarity, that he spoke of "my Lord."

Julian has a long struggle ahead of him, but last night was a night for thanksgiving: after eight months of homelessness, he has at long last moved into his own apartment.

After serving seven years in prison, Julian was released and told that he had exactly 30 days to find work. He was given a motel room for the month, but this was toward the end of October of last year, the same time that the economy was imploding every morning on the front pages of the newspaper. When his 30 days had come and gone without producing employment, his parole officer spread out a map before him and pointed to a creek.

"If you go here, you'll find some guys camped out under this bridge." Julian stared at the map, and then up at the parole officer. What was he saying? "I would recommend taking your stuff and heading to this area here," the parole officer continued, running his index finger over a squiggled blue line on the city map. Julian waited for the punch line, but it never came. He was simply shown the door.

Leaving the parole office, Julian felt an overwhelming chill settle into his bones. With great difficulty he piled all his possessions onto his bicycle, and frustrated, alone, and slipping beneath an onslaught of despair, he began to pedal toward he knew not what. 

As he rode slowly toward the creek, Julian heard a voice, an insistent, nagging, demanding voice telling him to swerve into traffic. Just a subtle shift of his weight on the handlebars would give him rest and would put an end to the daily struggle to survive. 

But Julian resisted the voice that day, and instead of heading to the creek, he settled for a patch of sidewalk. And for the next eight months, he slept on the street, along railroad tracks, in shelters, in a van, and now, after what at times seemed to be an utterly hopeless situation, he was sleeping in his own apartment, on his own bed.

But in spite of what might have been a time of jubilation, there was something weighing on Julian's soul. "What's the matter?" I asked.

Julian looked into my eyes. "What I'm afraid of is that if I continue to receive such blessings as these, I might turn my back on God--I might think I don't need Him anymore."

And right then he buried his face in his hands and prayed that he would remain faithful.