I’m standing in the back during the worship segment of Church Under the Bridge and start a conversation with the well-dressed man next to me. It’s too loud to hear each other, so I gesture away from the space. When we move off, Dylan leaves his bag of belongings on his metal chair. Knowing what I do now about the tendency of things to, well, disappear, I raised my eyebrows at this.
“You sure you don’t want to take your bag?”
“Yeah, it’ll be fine,” he smiles.
I shrug and we walk to a segment of sidewalk farther from the music.
Midway through our conversation, the music has stopped and we walk back over. I keep an eye on his bag, and I swear it’s there when the next time I glance over, that metal chair is empty. He senses something wrong, because he turns around to look behind. Someone’s taken his bag.
The next fifteen minutes, we walk around the entire area scanning the ground and people’s hands for a stuffed black drawstring bag. It’s useless.
I feel terrible, to say the least. Even though I wondered why he hadn’t taken his bag with him in the first place… I feel totally, completely responsible. This is the first time through this whole project that I’ve felt complicit in doing harm.
So I go to Chris, one of the Mission Possible regular volunteers, and tell him what happened.
He says, exasperated, that this happens nearly every week and Dylan usually goes around screaming at people to look for his bag and does nothing himself to search for it. And he usually goes through cursing at everyone he sees and cursing at the Mission Possible staff themselves.
That seemed totally opposite to my impression of Dylan. So now I don’t know what to think.
This is what Dylan said:
“People are going to be people. Somebody’s going to run off with my bag. What are they going to do with it? My phone’s not in it.
Somebody stole my bag—so what? If it can be replaced, I didn’t lose nothing. I’m just cold and would like my jacket, and my phone will die, and need my phone to keep in contact with my job to go to work. But in life, I’ve noticed that things aren’t going to go my way. This place is not Heaven. It’s a battleground. Some people choose to do what they want and follow the Evil One—he’s a liar and doesn’t worry about the people he already got. I already got him! he says. It’s the people who preach the gospel to those who don’t know.”
Chao,
Isabella – 3/26/2017