Shooting Straight

His health is deteriorating now. After working outside for nearly all of his life, he can now barely walk to his car. He has emphysema from decades of smoking, and nerve damage from an old head injury that causes his hands to shake constantly. Some days he can't get out of bed.

He is elderly and is the last of an era. His generation have lived hard lives of hard work. Some are good and honest and generous in a way that few people are today. Some have spent their lives with a bottle as their closest friend, and honesty and trustworthiness as their enemies. They earned their livings from the ground and from factories and from mines; many loved, laughed, and lived their whole lives often only a stone's throw from the house they were born in.

I've never seen a house so small as the shack he lives in now. His two grown sons live in houses on either side of his, but rarely come to see him. His house in its entirety is about the size of a dorm room--and it has no running water, and is heated by a coal stove. A lady in another town pays for his cable so that he can watch Animal Planet and Walker, Texas Ranger. My dad drops in every so often to make sure his stove is still running right. Meals-on-Wheels delivers his lunch every day.

On Christmas, my dad and I dropped by his place to give him some coffee and Christmas cookies. His kids had brought him two styrofoam bowls of Christmas dinner--a little bit of canned green beans and some cranberry sauce. He doesn't get many visitors, and my dad is probably his most faithful friend. He liked me, and I felt honored that he showed me some of his treasures.

You see, the only precious things in his life these days are his guns. He worked for the Pennsylvania Game Commission for many years, and collected, refurbished, and dealt in guns on the side for most of his life. Now they're all he's got, and probably the only things that keep him going. Most of his room is taken up with them--wooden stocks hung from the ceiling to dry from their latest coat of polish; bullets and rifle shells on display in a glass case; game commission signs hung next to an old bear head trophy his dad shot decades ago; rifles hung neatly on the wall above his bed; a cute little Smith & Wesson .22 handgun tucked under a cushion ("in case of the Boogie Man", he said). On good days, he shines barrels and refinishes stocks and draws targets on cardboard for my dad. His guns are his whole life. He's too sick to come to our house for Christmas dinner, and yet he dragged himself into his car, drove way back out into a field, and went hunting with his old muzzle-loader on icy New Year's Eve. He knows more about guns, and knows more people who deal in guns, than anybody.

He's made a lot of mistakes in his seventy-some years. He's estranged from his wife, and his sons don't seem to care much for him either. Decades of smoking are slowly suffocating him to death, and yet he continues to chew snuff, and will probably never stop. He's dirt poor, and he's dying.

Church doesn't have much of a place with him. God probably doesn't either. But on his wall is tacked a scrawled list of names under the heading "I Owe" with a side note of "more than I can ever repay." He insists on paying the $1.75 for the water we bring him. He skimps on food and medical care so that when he dies, there'll be money to leave for his son's home mortgage. He gasps and shakes to open old boxes so I can admire his shining old handguns. He's stubborn and rough, but at the same time, he's honest and giving.

Dad and I know we'll never change him, and it would be worthless to try. But nobody's going to love this sinful, dying child of God if we don't. So Dad drops by to put coal in the stove, and I show him the targets I shot at the range. We bring him his sausage-egg sandwiches and coffee and free samples of medicines for the pain. And I wonder, who is more blessed for the loving, him or me?

I think it's me. It's crazy how God works like that. I always find Him right where He said He'd be.

While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many tax collectors and "sinners" came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and 'sinners'?" On hearing this, Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."

--Matthew 9:10-13