At a closer vantage, the man appeared to move a little easier than Logan would have guessed by the years that the man’s appearance suggested. Logan attributed his overestimation of the man’s age to his very weathered skin, making him look much older than he truly was.
His thick beard covered his mouth, and his uneven hair splayed over his shoulders, cascading down his back and chest. He looked to be almost six and a half feet tall, a full six inches taller than Logan.
The man had one particularly striking feature that caused Logan to nearly stop in his tracks. The man’s eyes were like nothing that Logan had ever seen before.
They were a deep, rich blue that seemed to exude a tranquility and ease that Logan had never seen on the pained, troubled expressions on most of the homeless in the area.
“Can you help me get something to eat?” the man asked him in a calm, gentle voice.
The question caught Logan off guard, and he found himself staring into the man’s striking eyes.
Recomposing himself, he replied, “No problem, let me check… see what I have… just a second.”
Digging into his pockets, he found a few bills and a little change. Without counting it, knowing that it was not that much to begin with, he gave it all over to the older man.
The man accepted the money, folding his long fingers over it. He nodded slowly towards Logan, with an approving look.
“Thank you,” the old man said in the gentle voice. “I have seen far fewer generous people these days. I do desire to repay you.”
“It’s no problem at all,” Logan replied. “Call it a gift. No need for any repayment. We all need a break once in a while. I’ve had days I’ve been short too.”
A slight grin came to the man’s face, barely perceptible through his thick mass of facial hair.
“Thank you again, and have a nice day,” the man replied, nodding again to Logan as he headed onward, right in the direction of the all-hours eatery.
Abruptly, as if he had forgotten to mention something important, the man paused and turned back towards Logan. He looked directly into Logan’s eyes, with an unwavering gaze.
“Then my gift to you is this. Perceptions of the rightness of something can often be in error. Perceptions of the wrongfulness of something can also often be in error. It is always wisdom to look again closely. The true victory is in the correct judgment, and one can always change a judgement if one is still breathing. Things are often not as they appear. This is true on many levels, and in many ways. Bless you, for your kindness to a stranger, and remember this.”
Turning back again, without waiting for a reply, the man resumed his path.
Logan watched the old man walk off. He did not have the first idea as to what to make of the old man’s parting words.
Part of him wanted to brush the man off as merely another bizarre component of the colorful tapestry of a downtown and campus environment. Another part of him was not so hasty. The old man had spoken succinctly and intelligently, and Logan wondered what his story really was. Logan saw no real way to find out the truth, even as intriguing as the old man was. Letting off a little sigh, he finally shrugged and continued into the front door of the popular campus music store.
For the next thirty minutes or so, he browsed the music racks. If he had some money to spare, he knew that he could have easily spent it. As it was, he had to file away notes in his mind, at least until he had a little more discretionary income.
Without making any purchase, he walked out of the store and turned to head back. A few blocks away was his house, situated within an older neighborhood. It was well past the time that he needed to be returning to his work.
Looking ahead, he saw the homeless man that he had given money to. The old man was crossing the street about a block down from where he was.
Coming down towards the street from the opposite side was a person that Logan recognized, accompanied by two others that he did not. Logan paused to watch the inevitable crossing of paths, curious to witness the result.
The trio of neatly dressed, clean-shaven young men neared the old man as he stepped up onto the sidewalk. Logan recognized the young man in the middle as being from an immense church in town that Logan had done some work for on a few occasions.
Softball fields, classroom complexes, basketball gyms, auditoriums that could seat over five thousand individuals, and more occupied the monstrous church complex. Logan was well aware that many people moving to Lexington seeking to advance in the community joined the prominent, influential church.
Logan was sure that the three young men were probably doing a little better than himself in a financial sense, and surely were capable of helping the old man. He watched the developing encounter with a little interest.
The old man turned to them as they approached, and from his gestures Logan knew that the old man was soliciting some help from the three young men.
Logan watched with amusement as the three young men stiffened up a little as they neared the strange homeless man. Their body language was clear enough. They were well aware of the old man’s overture and presence.
Two of the men soldiered onward, trying to act as if they did not even notice the old man. The third was shaking his head in the negative, at least giving the old man a response, though he barely broke stride to do so.
The homeless man did not exhibit any change in posture, as they passed, simply nodding to them and continuing on up the street. One of the two young men that had supposedly not taken account of the old man chanced a glance back at him, as the trio neared the side of the street that Logan was on.
Logan had not been surprised in the least by their rejection of the old man. Their response was exactly as he had predicted, though for the old man’s sake he wished that he had not been accurate.
He almost broke into a laugh at the worried expression upon the face of the one looking back towards the old man, as if the fellow was deeply concerned that the old man might be following them to accost them.
Shaking his head, Logan chuckled to himself as he walked onward. He knew that the three had religion, but was not so sure that they had faith. Watching their encounter with the homeless man prompted him to muse for a few moments on the subject of religion, and how it was not necessarily the same thing as faith. It was an interest of his, at least on an intellectual level, even if he did not practice any particular form of it.
The concepts of free will, gods, devils, and destinies intrigued Logan well enough. He had absorbed quite enough about those topics over the years, at a parochial grade school and through regular independent reading that had given him a solid grasp of the world’s various faiths.
There were some obvious conclusions that he had come to.
History marched onward as the dust of self-proclaimed prophets, predicting the world’s end, had long since blown away in the winds of time. That same history also held a litany of figures who had shamed the faiths that they were public leaders of, while some of the most pious and reverent persons of history had been persecuted, defamed, and killed as heretics.
Logan had come to see religion as a creature that differed very little from the basic forces that ruled mankind. Adherence and affiliation to religion, in the proper context for a given culture, was used across the world to bring power, wealth, and influence in a manner that had little to do with the tenets of the various faiths themselves.
The inability of the public to recognize this reality had long angered Logan, and turned him away from any positive connotations when it came to matters of spirit. It had become difficult for him to separate the concepts of religion and faith.
The world was filled with many groups that were irrevocably convinced that they had full dominion on truth. At best, only one of them could be right. At worst, none of them were right. Looking at it from a detached perspective, it was a confounding situation.