on self-worth and cigarettes

"Draw what it feels like when you're not able to write," Amy told me.
    
"Do what?
    
"Just draw it. It can be whatever you want. I'm going to the restroom."
    
She was trying to help me overcome my "writer's block". I stared at my pint glass, almost empty, before taking the last sip. There were dollar bills with people's names, or football teams, or hometowns written on them, stapled to the walls and ceiling. A man sat down two stools to my left and asked the bartender how many were up there. I rolled my eyes and imagined being the bartender, vowing to break a bottle the next time someone asked me that.
    
"Thousands," he said. "We've never actually counted.
    
I drew a stick figure with out-turned pockets, and his hands held up as if to say, "Nothing". I drew a dollar sign over his head.
    
"You feel poor?" Amy asked, returning from the bathroom. She raised her glass to her lips and I could smell the soap on her hands.
    
"Worthless," I said. "Most people define their worth by the amount of money they have. I guess sometimes I define mine by my ability to express myself."
    
"Because if you can write it, you can control it?"
     I looked at her face, but couldn’t hold her gaze.
"I've got to go," I said. "I'll call you later." I paid for our drinks and walked down Vendue, turned left on East Bay and went towards the Battery.



**************

    

I remember learning to pray in Sunday School when I was five or six. My class met in something called the FamilyLifeCenter - which was the church word for gymnasium - in the room next to the coke machine. Our room had concrete walls, brown carpet that wasn't soft, and a chalk board. Three doors down was where they kept the roller skates with dirty orange wheels that were off limits except on Wednesday nights.
     Our teacher told us that we could ask God for anything, because He was always listening.
    
"What are some things you would ask God for?" she asked us.
    
"To keep my family safe," one kid said.
     
"To help me not get in trouble," said someone else.
   
  She wrote everything we said on the chalkboard, and put our names beside what we were praying for. When it was my turn I told her I couldn't think of anything right now, and she told me that was okay.
    
  "Now," she said, once the chalkboard was full, "let's get in a circle and ask God for these things.
    
We grabbed our folding, light brown metal chairs and put them in a circle.
    
"Who would like to go first?" she asked?
    
I raised my hand.
    
"You don't even have anything to pray for," my best friend, Travis, told me.
    
"So what," I said.
    
"That's fine," our teacher told me. "John can go first, then Travis, and then we will keep going around the circle." She told us to close our eyes.
    
I sat there for seconds, minutes, days, unable to think of anything to say. All I knew was I didn't want Travis to have anything to pray for, either, so I finally prayed for his prayer request.
 We were all holding hands, so when I was done I squeezed his hand, because that's how our teacher told us to let the person next to us know it was their turn. He looked at me with his eyes wide open, shaking his head. He didn't say anything. After a few seconds I started praying again; this time asking God for everything else on the chalkboard.
    
I prayed for Melissa's cat, who was older than her, and who was sick and might have to go to kitty heaven. I prayed for some new kid, David, who lived with his grandmother and had to wear an eye patch because a mosquito had somehow bitten him on the eyeball - I asked God to please not let him have to wear glasses when the eye patch came off. I prayed for Will, that he wouldn't be in trouble anymore for pulling his pants down in daycare and showing everyone his "he-he". Everyone laughed and the teacher told them to keep their eyes closed and be quiet. When I was done with the things on the chalkboard, I prayed for our teacher, that she would have a good day, and then I said "A man". We all opened our eyes and class was over.
My Sunday School teacher told my parents that I was such a good young man, and that I was more worried for everyone else than I was for myself, and told them how I prayed for everyone in class that day. I remember how good it felt when my mom said, "I know he is," and my dad laughed a little bit and put his heavy hand on my head.



************

    

I walked around the Battery for over an hour that night, watching the red and green lights of boats passing each other on the silent water. I thought about my stick figure, and writer's-block, and how worthless I felt. I thought about everything bad that had happened over the past year and a half.
I had caught my wife with another man. She left me to be with him. The church I had started fired me when I told them about it. My friends abandoned me. I lost my house, and most of my savings account.
I lost who I was.
    
That night, I grew tired of thinking about myself.
    
What am I doing? What a stupid thing to believe... that my worth and my identity is dependant on my ability to fill a page with words…
or my job as a pastor…
or a house with a palm tree…
or someone else’s commitment to me.
  If Christians are right, that God really did become a man, and if I believe that, shouldn't I feel worthy just because Jesus said I was worth dying for? Is there anything more defining than that?
At some point in my life, I really did start thinking about others more than myself. Why was I letting what happened in Columbia make me spend so much time thinking about myself?

    
I worked my way back down East Bay Street. It was Friday night, and the sidewalks were filled with shaggy-haired guys and girls in heels walking in and out of bars.
    
I saw a man I had met a few weeks earlier named Leroy sitting on a concrete step outside a tobacco shop. Leroy is in his fifties, tall, powerful, with a voice like Barry White's. He doesn't have a home. His wife threw him out- I'm not sure why. He also doesn't have a job. He was sick for a while, he says, but "I'm getting a construction job on Kiawah Island. The boss say's he'll pick me up for work in the morning and start me out at $10.50 an hour."
 I don’t know if this is true or not.
    
People usually walk by Leroy, looking the other way so they won't have to feel guilty when they tell him they have nothing to give. Sometimes I do, too.
    
That night, I saw Leroy the way God saw him. I didn’t look down on him, or want to help him out of pity. That night, I saw Leroy as the son of a King, named by God.
I asked him if he wanted to go eat some chocolate cake. I don't like cake, and I'm sure there are things homeless men need a lot more than chocolate, but it just felt right.
"You know I do," he said, his smile full of dirty teeth.
    
We went to a coffee house; I ordered a piece of cake and coffee, Leroy got cake, a piece of apple pie, and hot chocolate.
    
"And don't forget the whipped cream," he told the girl behind the counter.
    
We sat at a table beside the window, $27 worth of pointless calories in front of us, and talked about nothing. We laughed for an hour; at stupid things we had done, at people tripping on the uneven sidewalk outside, at how bad of a dancer this woman was who was moving her body to the Damien Rice cover a guy was playing on his guitar.
    
"I'm the epitome of a white boy who can't dance," I told him, "and even I think she's bad."
    
We left the coffee house and walked back to the tobacco shop I had seen him outside of earlier. He sat back down on his step, like it was his La-Z-Boy, and the street was his television. 
    
"I'll be right back," I said, disappearing inside.
    
I came back with a pack of the same cigarettes I had seen him smoking weeks before. He took one, and I told him to keep the rest. We sat for a while. Neither of us said anything. I remember thinking it was the most fun I had had in a long time.
Before I left, I reached across and patted his knee, as if we had been sitting on those steps and looking at that street since we were kids; lifelong friends with mortgages already paid. Then I put my hand, now heavier than my father's, on his shoulder.
    
"I had fun tonight, Leroy. Be looking out for me... let's do this again soon."
     
I got up, wondering if he thought it was weird that I had touched his knee. Maybe it was, but I once read that babies can die if they aren’t touched enough… it had something to do with not knowing who they were. Maybe it happens to the homeless, too. Maybe it happens to all of us.



“God fashioned man out of dirt from the ground, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life. The man came alive – a living soul!”
Genesis 2:7