You Just Ruined My Breakfast
by Jordan Henderson

You just ruined my breakfast.

This is not the most pleasant thing to hear when one sits down to eat. Yet as I sat down in the McDonald’s to eat my breakfast that morning in downtown Los Angeles, this was the first thing said to me by a man at a nearby table. You just ruined my breakfast.

What would cause this guy to say something like this to me, a person he had never met? I was participating on the very first Orthodox Youth Outreach mission trip. Our group of 28 people had been broken up into smaller groups of 3 or 4, and we had been instructed to walk through the downtown area of Los Angeles and find a homeless person to take out to breakfast. I had three high school students with me as we set out, nervously hoping to find someone on the streets to share a meal with.

I have to admit, even as one of the chaperones on the trip, I was a little anxious. What will these homeless people say when we offer to share a meal with them? Will they be offended? Disinterested? Perhaps more to the point, what will other people say?

I got my answer to that last question when I sat down. You just ruined my breakfast.

As my small group walked along the sidewalk, we came across a man in ragged clothes with a long beard sitting by the road. “We’re trying to find a place to eat cheap. Can you point us in the right direction?”

He pointed to the nearby McDonald’s. “Would you like to join us? Our treat.”

He seemed surprised, but got up and came with us. His name was Robert, and he told us he had been on the streets for many years. We walked into the restaurant and all ordered breakfast. The students in my group proceeded from the register to a side counter to fix their coffee and grab some napkins. Robert and I, meanwhile, walked over to an empty table and sat down.

Just as I was about to introduce myself and try to get to know him, a voice came from the next table. You just ruined my breakfast.

I looked up to find a man glaring at me as he sipped his coffee. What was that supposed to mean? As I looked at him, it was immediately clear. He did not come into this restaurant to eat next to a dirty homeless man like Robert. My first reaction was to become angry. Who does this guy think he is? I wanted to tell him what an ignorant and ridiculous thing that was to say. Yet just as I opened my mouth, I looked across the table at Robert.

He didn’t react at all. He just sat there. He looked as if this was the kind of thing he had heard innumerable times before. This cruel saying that caused me to be so upset had been said to him many times before – so many times, perhaps, that he no longer reacted to it. I looked back at the man next to us in silence.

How many times do we encounter people like Robert in our lives? What is our response to such people? Do we make cruel statements like this because they are dirty or smell bad? Do we make assumptions about them that they are lazy and probably deserve to be on the streets in order to justify our feelings toward them? Or perhaps even worse, do we simply walk by and ignore them? Can you think of anything worse than spending years of existence where people simply ignore you and pretend not to see you? This is the life of so many poor and homeless people throughout the world.

As Christians, we are called to respond in a different way. We are called to follow the example of Christ. Christ never failed to reach out and offer comfort to the poor, the lame, the sick, the wounded, and all those who were looked down on by society. He didn’t ignore them. He didn’t simply give them some money and walk away. He didn’t simply accuse them of being lazy or irresponsible and use this as an excuse not to reach out to them. He didn’t talk down to them. Instead, He “emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7).

This way of approaching the poor we come across in our lives offers a very challenging example: if Jesus, being God incarnate and having created the whole world, can lower Himself in this way, how much more ought we to do the same when we come across the poor and the rejected in our own lives.

Orthodox Youth Outreach is a program that offers students the opportunity to do just that. We coordinate mission trips that give students the opportunity not only to learn about poverty and help the poor, but to personally interact with them and to see the image of God within them. When this happens, all the stereotypes we have of the poor fade away. They cease to be the poor, the homeless, the bums, the others – instead, we come to see them as our brothers and sisters in Christ, sharing in the same humanity that Christ took on for our salvation.

After the other students came and joined us at the table, the man next to us continued to glare at me throughout our meal. I’m sorry I ruined his breakfast. But for the rest of us, it was one of the most significant meals we ever had.
 

Jordan Henderson is the Program Director of Orthodox Youth Outreach, a short-term mission agency of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.