the Berkeley kid*

I’ve gotten to know a small percentage of the students that I work with. A few of them, I would actually call friend. You know the kind of people that you might actually play Scrabble or a game of chess with.

There is this one kid, who I’ll leave anonymous, that I run into frequently because consequently the overhang/porch that our door exits to, is also a popular place for the smokers to hang out. The smokers, and this kid in particular, happen to be some of the nicest people in the building. Over the course of the semester we’ve had some dialogue. I initially met him over lunch because he responded to one of the bi-weekly devotionals, I send to all the residents, in a negative way. The subject was “Christ in the Midst of Tragedy,” something last semester knew all about.

Come to find out, this kid has had a difficult background. In a recent conversation he was talking to me about his two mothers. Just to clarify, yes you did read that right, his mothers are lesbians. This kid fits all the prerequisites for not belonging to Baylor. I’d expect to find him somewhere like, Berkeley (that’s for you Robert), but not Baylor. He knows the tenets of the Gospel, but has long rejected church because, surprisingly, the church rejected his mom.

So here’s my real problem. He’s not a jerk. How much easier life would be if people like him were jerks. Last night I saw him with a flashlight shining it down on something in the bed of his truck. Today when I was leaving for lunch, he was out there on the bench smoking, and so we began our typical small talk greeting and then I saw a tail of some small creature coming out of the large front pocket of his sweatshirt. “Know what that is,” he asked? I guessed correctly that it was a squirrel. With curiosity at a pinnacle, he began to explain the short story.

Apparently two kids from Martin Hall shot the squirrel with a bb gun. Stunned, but not dead the squirrel jumped of the roof of a building and flew downwards for fifteen feet before hitting the ground. The squirrel was now in pain, but not dead. My friend headed towards the squirrel to pick it up. When I saw him the night before he was feeding it nuts and giving it water in the back of his truck. Now the squirrel was curled up in his lap occasionally moving around in circles without use of the right side of it’s body, yet somehow finding comfort in it’s rescuers lap. My friend explained that he couldn’t just leave it there and let the two students torture it or kick it around like a hockey puck. He was trying to find a time in the day when he could go to the vet and see how much it would cost to have the squirrel put to sleep because he didn’t have the means (or the will in my opinion) to do it himself.

As I was walking away I thought, wow what compassion! That’s the sort of tedious attention to the seemingly insignificant that, that crazy Galilean Guy gave to marginalized.

Damn it! If only this kid was a jerk it would make judging the masses a lot easier. Now I’ve got to admit that I’ve learned something about my faith from the Berkeley kid.

*to understand my connotation of Berkeley, check out the Homecoming edtion of "The Noze" The article is something like "Baylor, Berkeley on the Brazos." Pretty funny stuff.