Have a Little Faith - Mitch Albom [60]
Instead, I have to believe that you have melted back into His glory, your soul is like a returned favor, you are a star in his sky and a warm feeling in our hearts. We believe that you are with your forefathers, with your daughter, with your past, and at peace.
May God keep you; may he sing to you, and you to him.
Where do we look for you now, Reb?
We look where you have been trying—good, sweet Man of God—to get us to look all along.
We look up.
…The Things We Leave Behind
Emptiness is not tangible, but after the Reb died, I swear I could touch it, especially on Sundays when I used to make that train trip from New York. Over time, I filled that slot closer to home, with visits to Pastor Henry and the church on Trumbull. I got to know members of his congregation. I enjoyed his sermons. And although I was comfortable, more than ever, with my own faith, Henry laughingly dubbed me “the first official Jewish member of the congregation.” I came to the homeless nights and wrote more stories about them. People were moved. Some sent money—five dollars, ten dollars. One man drove an hour down a Michigan highway, walked in, looked around, seemed to choke up, then handed over a check for a thousand dollars and left.
Henry opened a bank account for repairs. Volunteers came down to serve food. One Sunday, a large suburban church, the Northville Christian Assembly, invited Henry out to the suburbs to speak. I went to watch him. He wore a long black robe and a wireless microphone. The scripture he chose was flashed up on two giant video screens as he read along. The lighting was perfect, the ceiling solid and dry, the sound was concert quality—there was even a huge grand piano on the stage—and the audience was almost entirely white and middle-class. But Henry was Henry, and before long, he was moving around, exhorting the crowd to earn interest on their talents, as Jesus had once urged in a parable. He told them not to be afraid of coming to his church in Detroit, to use their talents there. “If you’re looking for the miracles God can do with a life,” he said, “you’re looking at one.”
When he finished, everyone stood and clapped. Henry stepped back and humbly lowered his head.
I thought about his dilapidated church downtown. And I realized that, in some ways, we all have a hole in our roof, a gap through which tears fall and bad events blow like harsh wind. We feel vulnerable; we worry about what storm will strike next.
But seeing Henry that day, being cheered by all those new faces, I believe, as the Reb once told me, that, with a little faith, people can fix things, and they truly can change, because at that moment, you could not believe otherwise.
And so, although it is cold as I write this, with snow packed atop the blue tarp on the church roof, when the weather thaws—and it always thaws—we are going to fix that hole. One day, I tell Henry. We will fix that hole. We will shake the generosity tree and raise the funds and replace the roof. We will do it because it needs to be done. We will do it because it’s the right thing to do.
And we will do it because of a little girl from the congregation who was born prematurely, weighing only a few pounds—the doctors said she probably wouldn’t make it—but her parents prayed and she pulled through and she is now a ball of energy with a grin that could lure the cookies out of the jar. She is at the church almost every night. She skips between the tables for the homeless and lets them rub her head playfully. She doesn’t have a lot of toys and she isn’t scheduled for countless after-school activities, but she most certainly has a community, a loving home—and a family.
Her father is a one-legged man named Cass, and her mother is a former addict named Marlene.