Tonight, I felt like a nut, like a freak, or like a crazy person.
My M.O.M.S. group meets in a room in our church. You can enter the room from inside the church and there are doors from the outside as well. We meet there at at night and with the summer ending it is dark when we arrive. We have never had a single person enter the room that wasn’t invited… until tonight.
While we were all sharing about what we had talked about with our partners, a man walked in. He talked, or slurred rather about how he was injured years ago and the church helps him… about how he was out of food and gas and had no money. He apparently had made his rounds at other churches and couldn’t reach anyone at the rectory at my church. He was given some help and then left.
My first reaction was fear. I was scared because of an experience I had several years ago in which I was part of a robbery. A man pulled a gun on me and my coworkers, shot it (although the police claimed they never found a bullet I know what I saw), stole the money we had and ran. He changed my life in a matter of minutes… seconds.
Tonight, the man coming into our meeting brought a flood of emotions back. I was stunned and frozen to my seat. I was scared. I cried. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until a new friend put her arm around me. I feel blessed to be cared about by the women in my group. At the same time, I feel like a complete nut that I cried about something that happened so many years ago… and in front of people that don’t know me well at all.
For what it’s worth, one of the priests came over after the man had left and said that he wasn’t dangerous and that this is something that the couple do. He said that they were looking for him and since he wasn’t available, the man came to our group because the lights were on. He told us to tell him, if he comes back, that he needs to find the priest and basically leave us alone. He actually joked that the reason the couple were out of gas was because they drive around to all the churches looking for money, which while said in a joking way is actually the truth.
We locked the door after he left and will be doing so from now on.
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