Here's to the Flower Guy

If you were to travel to Knoxville, and if you were to visit the older section of the city, you would find an old coffee shop named New City Cafe. I've visited that shop several times to watch live acoustic shows from out of town bands and even to watch some of my very own friends perform. Now, the concert hall is set up in such a way that anyone who was to walk in the front door could be seen by everyone watching the band. On countless occasions, I have sat comfortably at my candlelit table drinking hot coffee, when in from the front door would walk the Flower Guy.
It was always the Flower Guy. He always wore a tattered hat with a long tattered beard and old grubby clothes. To top off his unbecoming appearance, he always carried under one arm a bundle of flowers, and he would awkwardly sit by the front entrance while everyone nervously noted his presence out of the corner of their eye. He would sit waiting for someone to buy his flowers, and as he sat waiting, we would sum him up in our own minds. There he is. There's the man that has resorted to selling flowers for a living. Loser. Failure. Eh...the Flower Guy....

...It was about a year ago. It was the most vague assignment I had ever received. The professor said that he simply wanted us to express ourselves creatively whether it was through poetry, music or some other creative activity we could conjure up in our moldable brains. To me it was incredibly lame.
However, Charlie tossed it around in his head and decided what he was to do. He approached me and asked me to go along. I said yes, because I figured it was adventurous and I'd want to tell my kids someday how I was a daring young man. However, in that moment I would've chosen a kick in the teeth over his plan. Charlie's idea was to go onto the streets of downtown Knoxville under the guise of homeless men for approximately 30 hours. We would write a report of what we experienced and hand that in as our creative project. Wonderful.
We asked our friend, Brent, to go along, because he knew a thing or two about the homeless lifestyle since he had worked so close with them and all. The appointed day came, and we put on old tattered clothes, and withheld from showering. We put dirt on our arms and necks and under our fingernails. Finally, after being dropped off, we crossed Henley Street Bridge into downtown Knoxville.
Throughout the course of the next several hours we were cussed out, yelled at, lectured to, and we even had people stick their upper halves out of car windows while pointing and laughing. It was utter humiliation.
As night fell, we found ourselves in Old City Knoxville, the older part of downtown. All the beautiful girls followed their beautiful frat boys into clubs filled with other beautiful girls and guys. The traffic whizzed by, and elderly couples strolled about very distinguished and comfortably arm-in-arm. All the while, we stared straight ahead at the passing traffic. We had walked miles at this point. We had begged, been yelled at (this time by other homeless men), we had also been asked to find prostitutes and drugs by these other homeless men. It was fearful as well as exhausting, and, as I stood on that dirty street corner, I realized that I had the least amount of worth on that street. Amidst all the clubs, cars, music, and people I held the least amount of value. No one cared and no one wanted to take interest in a young homeless kid who had done nothing with his life--who ended up a failure.
At that point I went down on one knee just to catch my breath and to give my legs a rest. As all the noise and chaos and partying whirled around me, I looked at the sidewalk in front of me as judgement after judgment was passed and after each condescending glanced pushed me lower and lower.
However, As I sat there gazing at the hot sidewalk in front of me, I saw them fall...a handful of flower petals.
After years of passing judgment and crushing this man with my own condescending glances. He reached down, destroyed his income, and lifted me out of my own worthless pit, so here's to the Flower Guy.

To listen to a sermon I preached based on this story please visit http://www.jbc.edu/college/students_seniorsermons_brown.php