Three Coins

I was already 10 minutes late when I opened the car door. The demands of the day had piled up and were now spilling over into evening. My mind raced as I sped across the city, trying to make up lost time. At least I had remembered to bring quarters for the meter. Now if I can just find a parking spot.

The hazy grey of dusk hung thick in the air as I past Pizza Luce and lurched into a parking space two blocks down. I quickly gathered my things and found the sidewalk, eyes down as I focused on my next meeting when my eyes were suddenly forced up by the sight of a heavyset woman staggering towards me.

With severely slurred speech, she asked if I could help her out with some change.
"I'm hungry and I'm pregnant," she said as she held her belly.
"I don't have any money but I can pray for you" slipped out of my mouth before I realized what was happening. A look of confusion passed across her face.

"I can pray for you", I repeated to both her and myself. "What's your name?"

"Bitch" she said with a jaded defiance that caught me off guard.
"What's your name?" I tried again, not believing I could have heard right.
"Bitch, my mother named me bitch".
"Well what's your nick name then, what do your friends call you?"
A heavy pause held the question in place as I watched her mind struggle between the layers of drug induced forgetting and the faint memory of who she once was. When she felt human.

"Prayer" she scoffed out loud. "What can prayer do?"

"We can ask for God to protect you and your baby", I offered. She gave me a nervous look and began to back away, as if I might be the one to bring her harm. Falling back into her well worn script, she asked one last time if I had any change to spare.

In that moment, my heart broke for her and I could see that the connection I had with her was breaking as she started to sink back inside herself. Then I remembered the quarters I had in my pocket! I reached in to give her all that I had and then time started to move in slow motion. I raised my hand to give her the coins and I'm ashamed to say that part of me did not want to touch her. A modern day leper who would somehow make me unclean. As I dropped the 3 coins in her hand she suddenly reached up and grasped mine!

"You can pray for me now" she said, my name is Karen. In stunned disbelief I held her hand tight and began to pray right there in the middle of the street.
"God protect Karen's soft heart and her baby" and I watched as her face, hard and carved deep with the pain of a broken life, softened. Then came a torrent of tears that carried the ache of prolonged suffering from deep inside her, rushing to the surface.

She wept.

Allowing herself to feel something real startled her and she pulled away, slipping back down into the shadows of the street.

Or imagine a woman who has ten coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp and scour the house, looking in every nook and cranny until she finds it? And when she finds it you can be sure she’ll call her friends and neighbors: ‘Celebrate with me! I found my lost coin!’ Luke 15:8-9