Have a Little Faith - Mitch Albom [53]
I thought about how churches and synagogues usually build memberships. Some run schools. Some host social events. Some offer singles nights, lecture series, carnivals, and sign-up drives. Annual dues are part of the equation.
At I Am My Brother’s Keeper, there were no dues, no drives, no singles nights. Membership grew the old-fashioned way: a desperate need for God.
Still, none of this helped Henry with his heating problems or his bills. His Sunday services continued inside a plastic tent. The homeless nights were still noisy with hot air blowers, and the men kept their coats on when they lay down to sleep. Early winter continued its attack, and the snow piled up on the church’s front steps.
Although I tended to stay away from religious themes in my newspaper writing, I felt a need to expose these conditions to the readership of the Detroit Free Press. I did interviews with a few of the homeless, including a man who was once an excellent baseball player, but who’d lost all ten toes to frostbite after spending the night in an abandoned car.
I filed the stories, but something still nagged at me.
And so one night, just before Christmas, I went to Henry’s house. It was down the block from the church. He had mortgaged it for thirty thousand dollars, back when he arrived in Detroit sixteen years ago. It might not be worth that today.
The brick facade was old, a front gate was loose, and the empty lot where he’d once served food to the neighborhood was matted with snow, ice, and mud. The shed where they stored the food was still there, with netting to protect it from birds.
Henry sat on a small couch in his front room—where Cass once spent a year. He was suffering a head cold and he coughed several times. His place was tidy but poor, the paint was peeling, and the ceiling in the kitchen had partially collapsed. He seemed more pensive than usual. Maybe it was the holiday. His walls held photos of his children, but it was clear they weren’t getting a lot of Christmas presents this year.
In his drug dealing days, if Henry wanted a TV, customers would trade him one for dope. Jewelry? Designer clothes? He didn’t even need to leave his house.
I asked if he ever thought, when he entered the ministry, that one day he might be doing better than he was?
“No,” he said. “I think I was meant to work with the poor.”
Yeah, I joked, but you don’t have to imitate them.
He looked around at the crumbling house. He drew a deep breath.
“I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
How do you mean?
He lowered his eyes.
Then he said something I will never forget.
“Mitch, I am an awful person. The things I have done in my life, they can never be erased. I have broken every one of the Ten Commandments.”
Come on. Every one?
“When I was younger, in some way, yes, every one.”
Stealing? False witness? Coveting?
“Yes.”
Adultery?
“Umm-hmm.”
Murder?
“I never pulled the trigger, but I was involved enough. I could have stopped things before a life was taken. I didn’t. So I was involved in murder.”
He looked away.
“It was a cutthroat business, dog eat dog, the strong preying on the weak. In the lifestyle I was in, people were killed. It happened every day.
“I hate that person I was. I went to prison for a crime I did not do, but I did things out here that I should have gone back for. I was cowardly. I was hard. That may not be who I am now, but it’s who I was.”
He sighed. “It’s who I was.”
His chin dropped to his chest. I heard his nasal breathing, in and out.
“I deserve hell,” he whispered. “The things I’ve done, God would be justified. God is not mocked. What you sow, you reap.
“That’s why I tell my congregation, don’t put me on a pedestal. I sermonize about wanting cherries when you’re planting lemons, but I’ve planted many lemons in my life…”
His eyes were teary now.
“…and I may not have reaped all that harvest.”
I don’t understand, I said. If you think you’re going to be punished—
“Why still serve God?” He smiled