I was strolling down Lindell on a crisp, bright winter's day, enjoying the sunshine gleaming off of the new fallen snow. A huge round young black man yelled out from across the busy street: "hey mister, hey wait!" he jay-ran across, heedless of the traffic and pulled up puffing in front of me, his St. Louis street vendor certificate blowing around his neck - "it's a mooch", I thought.
"Hey mister, I represent (he mumbled some alphabet soup agency) and would you like to buy...." I put my hand up - I was prepared for such simple come-ons: "I'm sorry, I never purchase from or give to organizations that come up to me on the street, it's just my policy, I'm sorry." I turned away and walked off, congratulating myself for handling the situation in a philosophically consistent way. He muttered "I was just tryin' to make a living".
But I didn't really hear what he had to say because he had already ceased to exist. With my statement I had defined him outside of the circle of people and things that I had to worry about - I had made him "somebody else's problem".
In his brilliant (well at least to me) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy Douglas Adams described the theory of a "Somebody Else's Problem" field - an "SEP" for short. In Adam's cracked cosmology SEPs were used to make things invisible - by defining something as "somebody else's problem" one could get people to walk by spaceships, buildings, even massive mountains without noticing they were there. And that's what I had done to my rotund interloper. After all, I had learned as a boy on the streets of Kebayoran Baru that one couldn't possibly help all of the people who needed it. There were too many of them and their needs were too great - to survive emotionally you needed to harden yourself and look past the pain and suffering around you. Indonesia had taught me to build my walls high and tight. And it worked - I now am a master at making things somebody else's problem.
Yet Jesus came to make everyone His problem. I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to be Him: fully human and yet knowing, indeed, feeling the seemingly infinite roar of sin and pain and needfulness around him. I can hardly handle my own troubles, yet He confronted an entire world's. No wonder He sometimes fled the crowds - there were too many, it was too much.
What the young man was really saying to me - what we all say every time we come into each other's presence - was: "I am here, I am real, and I matter". For if Jesus came and died for each of these then how can they not matter to us? How can they simply be "somebody else's problem". All of these thoughts and a few more besides flashed through my mind as I fled down the street. They rose to a crescendo and stopped me in my tracks. "Aw crap!" I said and began to backtrack - of course I could help him - I had a few minutes and I knew exactly what he was doing wrong - didn't the clowns at the agency teach him anything? "First of all you don't go running up to people yelling in inner city Saint Louis - do you want to get your ass shot? Let me tell you how to engage people respectfully in a conversation, solicit their help, get them on your side so they want to buy your...what is it you're peddling again?" I double timed back up Lindell, rehearsing Sales 101 in my head - where was he? Gone. How in the hell could a guy that big disappear so quickly? Gone.
"Lord forgive me. Please help him, show him the answers to his questions, show him that he is loved, heal him from any harm that my indifference did him" - it didn't seem like much. After all, I was going to fix him. But I sensed a feeling of completion - it was enough - it was OK.
I turned around and headed for the office. For a while after that I stopped averting my gaze from the people on the street, I looked in their eyes, I said 'hi'. In some small way I widened my circle a bit and let a few others in.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." Whoever. And none of them are somebody else's problem
