Angry over bread…
A little while ago, we were at the street church, where bread and soup were being distributed to the homeless, among others. And suddenly, one of the homeless completely flipped out…
Filled rolls were also being handed out (which we receive from a bakery after they close), and someone had eaten the filling but left the rest of the bread on the street…
Someone else had eaten the sausage from the soup and left the rest of the soup on the sidewalk…
Completely flipped out, totally! Not just angry, but emotionally ballistic, with no boundaries left—furious in every sense.
If you don’t understand why he was so angry, it’s easy to see him as just another homeless person acting like an idiot, that drunk who’s had too much again, that madman they really ought to lock up.
But if you understand why he was angry, if you get the context… then it becomes a different story. Because tomorrow, he’ll be hungry again, with no food, and he’ll remember that bread that was just thrown in the corner, and that soup that’s now gone. How much he would have loved to have that bread and soup then. But no, it was wasted…
And then you understand why he completely lost it… and instead of seeing him as ‘yet another fool,’ you look at him with compassion, empathy, and give him a hug, some attention and food for tomorrow…