ON a visit to New York, while doing my morning quick walk along the East River in Manhattan one morning, watching fancy boats cruising down, the water gently flirting with the riverbank, and on the other side, fast cars swishing down roads at breakneck speed, when I saw ahead of me, right in my path the NYPD, which is the New Police, with their guns out, and I said, “Oh God, a shootout!”
But it wasn’t. It was just a pathetic tent that had been randomly put up under a flyover, and the police, not sure what to expect, were ready with their guns out. After a while a disheveled man walked out, bleary-eyed with sleep. He looked sheepish and a tad startled seeing the guns, and when the police saw he was harmless, they also looked sheepish and lowered their weapons. It was another of the homeless sadly found in big cities! I see them in the nights, men and women trying to keep the cold out as they use cardboard cartons as blankets, and sleep anywhere where there’s a flat surface. It doesn’t matter; it’s an affluent city; the homeless are always around.
In India too, we see them; pavement dwellers, we call them. It doesn’t take too much to become one of them. Today with WhatsApp messaging, I find at least one missing person’s photo coming to me every week, explaining he or she walked out of their homes and disappeared. It could be amnesia, dementia, Alzheimer’s, or plain disappointment at ill treatment from those at home.
One young man who walked out of his home, did so many years ago to enjoy his share of his inheritance, spent all the money and as he lay homeless with the pigs in their dirty, filthy pens, he thought of his home, and decided to return. Return he did, and his father, seeing him afar, ran to him, shouting with joy, “My son is yet alive!” And bringing him home, gave a feast in his honour and there was much rejoicing!
That’s the same rejoicing there is in many homes when the homeless are found and taken back. That’s the same rejoicing in the heavens when you return from your self-imposed journeys of self-discovery, following some guru, or cult and return to Him.
Even though He’s God, yet every lost, searching person gives Him a heartache. Jesus was the one who told the people the story I just mentioned about the prodigal son who walked out and the father who seeing him return was filled with joy, explaining with that story how He as God waits anxiously, whispering ‘Come home son! Come home my daughter! Come ye searching people! Come home, where you will always feel loved and wanted!” If you are feeling lost, return! He’s waiting..!
—(bobsbanter@gmail.com)
