Matthew 25:40

Though I’ve been a Christian since I was very young and I’ve grown up in church, I have always struggled with truly knowing Jesus and making Him real to me. I know what I’ve been taught and what I’ve read, but it is hard for me to grasp who the living, personal Jesus is to me.

Last December, God began to shape and revolutionize the way I see Him forever. A friend and I had decided to go to the downtown portion of my city, which has a very high homeless population, with packages of cookies, blankets, socks, and gloves in hopes that we’d find someone who needed them as we walked around. When we arrived, we prayed for opportunities and love, and we started walking. Soon we came to a bench with an older homeless man sitting on it, head bowed, and as we came close he raised his head, held out his hands, and asked for some change. My friend and I, incredibly excited about the beautiful answer to prayer, introduced ourselves to the man, gave him what money we had, and asked him if we could give him some supplies. He agreed—and perked up a bit when we mentioned cookies—and as we started for our car to get blankets and other provisions, he stopped us, took a bundle of miniature, real roses from inside his coat and gave them to us, telling us “God bless and merry Christmas.” We were both stunned and felt far more blessed by that man than we could have blessed him. It was on this day that God not only began to burden my heart for the homeless and forsaken, but also, as I looked into the man’s eyes, I saw more of Jesus than I had ever experienced. The raw emotion and sincerity that he showed us was something holy, and I felt like I had just met Jesus in “one of the least of these.” Since then, it has been in the faces of the homeless, the poor, and the needy that I have seen who Jesus is, and it is for them that I feel burdened and responsible as a Christ-follower, as Jesus said in Matthew 25:40 “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” I praise God for Larry, the man we met, and for how He taught me just a little bit about who Jesus is through him.