Talking to Strangers

Stop me if you've heard this one before. So I was walking home to shower on Monday after a fairly raucous evening at a friend's when I happened upon a man and his daughter sitting at the stairs by Red Square on campus.

I thought nothing of it at first until he called me over asking what my shirt meant.

"My life is my message. That's an awfully powerful statement to have on a shirt, where's it from?"

Having explained that it was a Gandhi quote, he then asked me what my message was. And so we talked. And I found myself spilling to this stranger the kinds of spiritual beliefs I carry with me and rarely talk about.

He asked me which, if any, religious affiliations I made for myself. He asked what I was doing here at Western, but unlike most people, followed it up by asking why.

He in turn shared with me that he was Josh, a Heretic and reverend and that the small, blonde, blue-eyed angel splashing her way through the puddles was Virtue.


Our conversation was short, 15 minutes at most and often interrupted by a sopping Virtue who came to share her dripping love.

He'd been in the army but had been kicked out for "entrepreneurial enterprises." Josh told me that some time after this, he became a Christian and learned Scripture well enough to be a reverend, but because of some of his more radical views, has had trouble staying with any particular church.

Silly little girls in silly little puddles

Now, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole religious experience; there's so much hypocrisy and hate within the history of the Christian church and I don't feel I'm educated enough in other doctrines to truly be able to accept them for myself, but I cannot shake the feeling that this conversation was a message to me from whatever higher power I'm serving.

"The better you can explain who you serve, the more of a purpose you will have in life."

Last night at Jack's I lost a part of one of my necklaces, a small clear marble that I got at the end of my volunteering with Power of Hope last summer. At the end of each camp session we hold a closing ceremony wherein everyone leaves something behind and takes something with them symbolically in the form of pebbles or the like and shiny stones or marbles.

At the end of this particular camp I was looking for direction. I was looking for purpose. So when I picked that clear marble, I called it my heart compass and imbued it with the power to serve as a reminder to trust myself, to trust that I know intuitively where I'm going. Later that same summer, I looked up wire wrapping online and turned the marble into a necklace most of you have probably seen me wearing.

I carry a lot of sentimental value in that little necklace, so it's loss only served to compound the quiet emotional struggle I'd been facing since early this morning or I suppose late last night depending on which side of sleep you look at it from.

In that sense, I was feeling down when I ran into this man. I was mentally heavy and weighed upon by a myriad of things and this short conversation was enough for me to decide I want to reevaluate.

There is power in the connections we make. If you imagine scale being a reflection of magnitudes, then the bonds we make as people are like the atomic links that form molecules a thousand fold stronger, and even short connections that can be counted in minutes have the power to change lives.

Like I said, I want to reevaluate. I want to take Josh's advice and figure out who or what I'm serving with my life, which admittedly has been a process I've been going through for some time now, just maybe not in those words.