The man was lying on the sidewalk covered by an old winter coat. When I lifted the coat, he lifted his face from a magazine—an issue of Newsweek with a cover story on nuclear war. I asked him, "Do you need some help?" He asked me, "Do you think they're going to blow up the world?"
Nothing seemed very helpful or hopeful in the raw drizzle that March afternoon. The young man under the coat was jobless, homeless, living on the streets between welfare checks. His personal history was bleak—broken family, poverty, drug use, a jail term for petty theft, etc., etc. His upbringing in an urban jungle seemed to have taken a psychological toll, leaving him hurt and angry beneath a shrewd exterior. In talking with others he habitually averted his eyes.
It was the kind of encounter one couldn't easily forget. It was the kind one would continue to pray about long afterward. The experience brought home the question "What does it mean to be a good Samaritan?" See Luke 10:30-35. in a way that statistics on poverty or crime or unemployment rarely do.
