Catch and release

On our way home from choir practice my daughter Anna was upset. The boy behind her tells gross jokes. He breathes down her neck. He sings off key and too loud. He's "yucky."

I knew boys like that growing up. Jimmy had acne and odd patches of facial hair on his face and sat right behind the alto section in high school choir, breathing on me when he sang, always overly eager, desperate in fact to talk to me. Because I was new to the school I was initially friendly but soon realized his low place on the social totem pole and started ignoring him.

Normally I would tell my daughter to do what I did and act like the boy didn't exist.

But I had just finished reading Same Kind of Different As Me, by Ron Hall, Denver Moore, and WORLD's Lynn Vincent.

In this true story, Ron, a rich art dealer, half-heartedly reaches out to the homeless in Fort Worth, Texas, at the prodding of his wife, Debbie. It's hard work, especially for a man used to soap and hot water. The people smell. They drink. They lack teeth. He puts in his hours, making food in the kitchen that smelled like "rotten eggs boiled in Pine-Sol," doing the bare minimum to satisfy the Mrs., but deathly afraid of contracting a terminal disease in the process.

One day Debbie has a dream. "It was like that verse in Ecclesiastes," she tells Ron. "A wise man who changes the city. . . . I saw his face."

Shortly thereafter, while at the mission, she sees the exact man from her dream, a homeless, scruffy, modern-day slave and ex-convict named Denver. Debbie insists God wants Ron to reach out to him, so Ron does. Kind of.

Well-acquainted with those volunteer types at the local mission, Denver sees right through Ron's half-hearted attempts to befriend him: "If you is fishin for a friend you just gon' catch and release," he says. "Then I ain't got no desire to be your friend. . . . But if you is lookin for a real friend, then I'll be one. Forever."

Mother Theresa spoke of this kind of friendship in No Greater Love:

"When we handle the sick and the needy we touch the suffering body of Christ and this touch will make us heroic; it will make us forget the repugnance and the natural tendencies in us. We need the eyes of deep faith to see Christ in the broken body and dirty clothes under which the most beautiful one among the songs of men hides. We shall need the hands of Christ to touch these bodies wounded by pain and suffering. Intense love does not measure-it just gives."

Ron and Debbie chose to love Denver, and he returned their love with fierce loyalty. Later in the book, Denver tells Debbie:

"You was the onlyest person that looked past my skin and past my meanness and saw that there was somebody on the inside worth savin . . . you stood up with courage and faced me when I was dangerous, and it changed my life. You loved me for who I was on the inside, the person God meant for me to be, the one that had just gotten lost for a while on some ugly roads in life."

Talking with Anna on the way home from choir, I remembered Jimmy. I remembered his shy demeanor and out-of-date clothes. I remembered his wry smile and his earnest desire to be my friend. Most of all, I remembered the day someone told me he had shot himself in the head.

As fishers of men, catch and release should never be our policy.