7/3/24

 I wrote a Pastor’s Note about Tom a couple of years ago. I ran into him again when I was in New Orleans last week. 

This was not the same man I first met some 6 years ago! The Tom I met back then was mentally unstable and angry - all the time. He was a constant dark cloud whom the residents of the French Quarter dreaded, and they would walk across the street to avoid him. 

And there was nothing more that he HATED than tourists. 

My friend, Derek, and his wife Poppy lived in the Quarter until about a year ago. I remember standing on Royal Street, when I met Tom for the first time. Derek and I were talking to him and some tourists came up and pushed between us. He unleashed some of the most creative cussing I’ve ever heard!  

Now, Derek loves God and loves others, and others include Tom . . . and well, all of God’s creation for that matter. 

That combination of loving others and caring for God’s creation brought about a miracle! 

When Covid hit, all the areas that relied on tourism were hit hard. New Orleans was no exception.  The quarantine had unforeseen consequences for the Quarter: the birds that flocked around Jackson Square were used to being fed by the tourists, but now there were no tourists! So Derek and his wife would feed the birds everyday. 

When the quarantine was slacking off, and people were permitted to travel again, Derek and Poppy needed to leave town to check on her family in Panama City. They asked Tom to feed the birds while they were gone. And he did. 

And he continued to do it. 

And Tom is a changed man!  People in the Quarter would stop and ask Derek, “What did you do to Tom?” Tom is completely transformed because now his life has meaning.

He still feeds the birds! He even has a regular job where he works in order to buy bird feed. He also plays the hammered dulcimer on the streets for tips (and he’s good!). While we were talking, a car drove by and yelled at him. Before, he would have called them some choice and very precise names (complete with gestures) that I couldn’t print here, but this time, he threw up his hand, smiled and waved at them.

I walked away shaking my head. The change was and is amazing.  

By the way, and this has nothing to do with anything, but I know we have some Disney-philes: if you’ve seen the latest Disney Haunted Mansion movie (it’s wretched, by the way, and this is not an endorsement), Tom’s apartment is next door to the house where  the character Ben lived. It was a facade built on the only vacant lot in the quarter. It’s gone now, the lot’s empty again, and it’s one of the places where Tom feeds the birds — they flock around him when he goes outside. Tom and his birds were glad to see Disney go!

But this transformation from darkness to light is what can happen when we love God and love others. Someone who was a curse in the French Quarter is now a blessing. Why? Because someone loved the unlovely.

While giving money and donating goods for food drives or school drives is a great way toward “loving others,” there’s nothing better than actually spending one on one time with someone who needs to know they are loved. 

And that’s not just something we  do — whether giving or doing.  It is a reflection of who we are. 

I hope you’re thinking in terms of our vocation now. When we hear vocation, we usually think something like “the job I’m best suited to do,” but the original meaning of the word is “calling.” Our vocation or our calling as believers is “Loving God . . . Loving Others . . .”

This is the job God has called us to do. Derek went into a place of pain and as a result someone who 99% of society would have considered worthless and hopeless was redeemed. 

And to “Loving God . . . Loving Others,”  we might even add “Caring for Creation.” According to Genesis 1 and Psalm 8, that’s what God has called us to do to begin with, and as we’ve seen in Romans 8, what God has planned for us in the Resurrection: 

“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28).

“Yet you have made them a little lower than the heavenly beings [or angels or God, depending on your translation], and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas” (Psalm 8:5-8). 

Loving Tom and feeding the birds. Loving others and caring for God’s creation — that’s our vocation! And it’s our part of the great reclamation job God is doing in this world. 

Blessings,
Pastor Terry