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Portraits Magazine
Charlie
By April Lesher
Charlie was a middle-aged man with a long gray beard and straggly gray hair. He was thin-framed with dirty, untrimmed fingernails. Every single bit of Charlie was unwashed, and probably hadn't been washed in a month. Suffering from mental disease and living in low-income housing, Charlie wandered through the doors of an equally dirty and ramshackle church.
However poor and unappealing his living conditions were, Charlie found the money for cigarettes. He loved those cigarettes. And as every good community center should have, there is a smoking section at the Rio Vista Center. There are two actually. One in under the large tree next to the front parking lot and the other is located on the concrete slab behind the church.
It was against Charlie's habit to sit; he always squatted. Once or twice a morning, his familiar shape could be spotted crouching low underneath the shade of the "smoking tree."
When my husband, Tim, first started working at the Rio Vista Center, Charlie was the first church member he met. And they quickly became friends. Every now and then, Tim would hand him a clean set of clothes, or save a liter of Charlie's favorite soda in the refrigerator.
One morning Charlie walked in to get his daily dose of mission center coffee and day-old pastry. Tim immediately noticed that there was something peculiar about Charlie, but he couldn't quite place it. Charlie slouched eating his doughnut and Tim sat staring trying to figure out what had changed. Still grubby, still unkept.
Tim's eyes traveled over Charlie's face. There at the bottom of his messy beard were brown singed strings hanging in the place of long, grayish-white hairs. His long beard had been shortened about six inches.
"Charlie, what happened to your beard?" Tim asked.
"Cigarettes caught it on fire," Charlie said. Tim started to smile.
"Charlie, maybe that's God's way of telling you, you need to quit smoking," Tim joked.
Charlie looked up at Tim with clear eyes and said, "Maybe it's God's way of telling you, you need to cut my beard." So Tim added the title "barber" to his resume and gave Charlie a shave and haircut that afternoon.
Galatians 5:13b
"Rather, serve one another in love."
More:
April Lesher: Miracles