The child who leads...

The lines on his face told as big a story as the pink scar on his right hand.

It was a knife that did it, he said. His mud-colored eyes were bright, agitated, hopeful—because Eddie, who makes his home between the shelters of downtown San Antonio and the courtyard of Travis Park, doesn’t often have a chance to share his story.

Self defense. That’s what landed him in prison with an eight-year sentence dangling over his head. That’s what chained him to the streets eight months later, when he was released on good behavior, when he checked “convict” on a job application, when the world turned its back on him.

Eddie didn’t turn his back on the world, though. He opened his arms to it.

We met him by chance. A handful of the launch team from Hope Arise, a new church plant in north San Antonio, finished the church’s first worship service together by carpooling downtown to hand out sack lunches to the city’s neediest.

If I’m honest, I’d have to say I didn’t really want to be there on that particular day. I was feeling tired because I hadn’t slept well the night before. It was colder than I expected because I don’t watch the weather channel, and my sons didn’t have jackets to protect them from the biting wind or face masks to protect them from the germs I imagined gripping the people who live on the streets. My stomach was complaining because I hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before.

My attitude was all wrong. Then I met Eddie.

I’ve never met anyone like Eddie.

He wore V-shaped blankets draped over his ragged clothes—more than enough blankets, he said, so he could give them away when he met someone who was colder than he was.

He was not the first in line. He was not the second or the third or the fourth. In fact, he didn’t even take a lunch that day—handed the last sack we had in our travel bin to a man in a wheelchair, a man who had more wrinkles on his face than Eddie had. A man Eddie said needed the food more than he did—because a group had delivered some breakfast tacos that morning, and Eddie had eaten his fill.

Maybe it’s silly, but the more I talked to Eddie, the more I heard him quote the word of God with the authority of a beloved friend of Jesus, the more I watched him love on my son, on our group, on his homeless buddies, the more I felt like I was watching a true disciple of Jesus.

A disciple of Jesus living on the streets, carrying a tattered backpack with the only possessions he owns, sharing what little he does have with the people he meets.

He was so much like Jesus.

He and Jadon—my innocent, sees-no-prejudice 3-year-old—formed an immediate friendship, strengthened within minutes by Eddie handing Jadon some stale crackers he’d found in his bag so that Jadon could feed the squirrels and pigeons hanging around. When the crumbs in Jadon’s hand had been offered and eaten, my son followed Eddie across to the other side of the park, where five or six of Eddie’s friends were eating. Even though horror-struck caution started burning my throat, I let him go because I knew he was teaching me something, and I blinked the tears out of my eyes like a mother watching her son opening his arms to danger and disease and almost-certain ruin.

I watched the people around him, people who had lived a life I could never imagine, smile at the words Jadon spoke. I watched them touch his face and his hair. I watched him smile with them and laugh with them and play with them.

Later, Eddie said, “That is priceless,” pointing to Jadon, who was running into the middle of a group of pigeons and laughing hysterically when they took flight. His smile made his eyes shine. “I could watch him do this all day.”

We stayed in the park talking with Eddie longer than we’d expected. That’s why we met Richard, another wrinkle-lined man who had hit hard times but was hopeful they’d turn around soon. I was standing beside him, holding my nine-month-old Asa, when Richard told me with shining eyes that he’d had two children of his own who’d been taken away at the height of his addiction. Regret darkened his face, but his white whiskers stretched into a smile when Asa reached his hands out to him.

I watched, emotion clogging my throat, as Asa nuzzled Richard’s scratchy beard, as Richard threw back his head and loosed a gruff laugh, as Asa smiled at him and touched Richard’s cheek with his tiny little hands.

When we were leaving, Ashleigh Pepper, minister of students for Hope Arise, asked Eddie if there was anything we could bring next time that might make a day easier for him and his friends.

Eddie looked at Jadon and said, “That right there,” with a smile that thawed the last bit of caution away from my heart.

My children, with their unclouded love, their unprejudiced eyes, their know-no-stranger way of making the most unlikely of friends, had made a day for a man who sleeps on iron park benches and wears the only clothes he owns and eats whatever he can find whenever he can find it just a little bit better.

It wasn’t the sack lunch, with its peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich and its cheesy Doritos and its 20-ounce bottle of water. It was the children. My children.

Driving home with a tired and hungry Jadon, we asked our son if he’d had fun. He said he liked Eddie. He said, “I want to go see Eddie again really soon.”

I wonder what Eddie would say if he could hear those words.

I saw more angels that day than I’ve ever seen in my two-car-garage-, cable-TV-watching-, too-busy-making-ends-meet-to-really-be-friends world. Two of them were Richard and Eddie.

Two of them were my sons.

It’s true what Jesus says. It’s true that a little child will lead us. My children bore the truth of His words that day.

Thank you, God, that you have given me the privilege and honor of watching, raising, loving these angels. May I never, ever, ever forget.