“My job makes me do bad things.”
I had just woken up from my nap on the floor of the Miami airport on our layover from Costa Rica to Jamaica.
I noticed the scares along his forehead and a sadness in his eyes.
O’Neil chose to sit beside me. Of all the seats in Gate 29, the Lord sent him to sit beside me. The white girl sitting in her sleeping bag on the floor of an airport, trying to enjoy her crushed crackers from travel.
He talked and I listened through his strong Jamaican accent. Our conversation turned from vacation to fried fish to Jesus. O’Neil had grown up Catholic but had gone down a different path in his older years.
“I feel like God is in one pot and I’m in another. I’m always going the other way.”
He rolled up his sleeves to reveal an arm covered with scars.
“I’ve seen a lot of bad things and I’ve done a lot of bad things.”
My heart sank.
There sat a man in front of me who felt he had done and seen too much to be known by God. Thinking that he could never be in the same “pot” as Him.
It’s amazing that under his tough and scared skin, there was a man, without even realizing it, who desired something more. A man who had seen the evils of this world but still there was a part of him who wanted to deeply know God. A man who needed to hear God’s truth over the lies that the enemy had spoken over him.
So I made myself interruptible and I told my friend what God thought of him. He reasoned and theorized. I listened and answered.
My time with O’Neil ended as Group 6 boarded the plane but my conversation with him stayed with me long after.
How often in our life do we think we have done too much for God to love us? How many times do we look at our “scars” and think they are viewed as unworthy? Or think that the we could never enter the “pot” that God is inviting us in?
God wants us in the pot.
Not only does God want us to join Him in the pot but He wants to overflow it with His goodness and mercy. He wants us to feel the warm embrace of His perfect love.
So, join Him.
