Living Under the Overpass

Continued from page 1

SAN FRANCISCO

The Grace of Pizza

It was a busy Saturday night in Berkeley, throngs of students everywhere. We’d come here on BART (the Bay Area Rapid Transit system) earlier in the day in a search of better panhandling. So far, we were doing okay on the donations, not so great on the requests. We just never seemed to know the songs others wanted to hear.

Mike playing songs on his guitar

My fingers were getting sore from hours of playing. I stood to stretch, then yawned and laughed.

“What?” Sam asked.

“You know, before we came out here, a part of me was excited to have all this time to play the guitar. I figured I’d get a lot better. Six months on the street and I’d be the next Dave Matthews.”

Sam confessed to having similar thoughts.

I examined the calluses on my left hand. “We’ve gotten a little better, but not much. Out here, you don’t play to get better, you play to eat.”

“Yup, and that means being heard above the traffic.”
“So we’re not really playing and singing, right?” I said. “We’re strumming and yelling. We’re getting better at strumming and yelling.”

We both laughed, and I sat down to begin again. Just then three guys walked past, the lead guy carrying a pizza box.

“Hey bro!” I called. “You going to eat the rest of that pizza?”

The guy stopped, looked from Sam and me to his box of pizza, then said, “Nope.” Shaking his head, he walked over. “You want it?” he asked.

“Sure!” I said, and he handed it down to us.

We thanked him profusely. “No problem,” he said, walking away. “Enjoy.”

Opening the box we found half a pepperoni pizza. “Unbelievable!” Sam yelled.

“This is the good stuff!” I said, grabbing a piece. “Father, thank you for this food!”

We sat there, happily devouring the still-warm pizza. By the time we were down to the crumbs, we were ready for more conversation.

“‘Father, thank you for this food’ means something different out here, doesn’t it?” I said.

“Sure does,” said Sam. “I don’t know if I’ll ever say it so sincerely again after we get back.”

“I hope I don’t change,” I said.

Mike (left) and Sam (right)

We sat watching people walk by, thinking about pizza and thankfulness. “What do you think would have happened if the Israelites hadn’t gone out and picked up the manna God sent,” I asked.

“And your meaning is?” said Sam.

“I mean, don’t you think they would have starved if they never actually went out and picked the manna off the ground?”

Sam looked at me as if I had pepperoni poisoning. Finally, he responded. “Yeah, probably. They had to eat, and God was providing, but—yes—they had to go out and pick it up.”

“Exactly!” I said enthusiastically. “They had to pick it up! How dumb would it have been if some had starved because they refused to take what God was providing.”

Sam sounded thoughtful. “I’d be a lot more hungry right now if we hadn’t asked those guys for their leftover pizza.”

“Right,” I said, nodding. “We prayed for God’s provision, right? We prayed that He would bless us and give us what we need. But then when it walked by, we had to make our move. Asking and receiving means different things out here on the streets than back home. But the idea is the same.”

Sam didn’t look nearly impressed enough by my line of logic. So I kept at it.

“Just like you said,” I continued, “we’d be a lot more hungry if we hadn’t asked for that pizza. God answered our prayers for provision, but we still had to ask these guys for it. We still had to ‘pick up the manna.’”

Now Sam was nodding. “I wonder how much we miss because we’re unwilling to pick it up. That verse in Matthew, ‘Knock and the door will be opened,’ why have the door opened if you don’t walk through?”

“I know,” I said. “Kinda scary.”

“It’s like asking God to bless your day, then when He puts a needy, smelly person in front of you that you could really help, you wonder what you did to deserve such rotten luck.”

“Yep!” I agreed.

We both felt insightful, mature, brilliant to the point of genius. Manna does that to you.

In no time at all, we were back to strumming and yelling.

Continued on page 3: Why we didn't go to church in Phoenix »