I saw him sitting on the curb with his skateboard wedged under his knees as I approached the stop sign, and almost immediately decided he must be waiting there for a bus. He looked about 16…brown skin, dreads, baggy sweat pants and a basketball jersey that probably hung below his knees when he stood. He would have looked less out of place in my part of town than the in the neighborhood I was driving through.

As I slowed to a stop I might have simply looked straight ahead, filing his image away in my mind under “kid alone at dusk, waiting for a bus,” except for one thing. He was reading a book. Reading intently, and shaping the words with his lips as though saying them out loud might make them easier to follow. And the book he was reading was a paperback copy of Elie Wiesel’s Night.

His reading selection surprised me. Night is by no means light summer fare.

But for the book, he would have quickly disappeared from view, and from my mind. But what skater-kid with wild hair and time on his hands willingly reads a holocaust memoir/novel – even one told from the perspective of a 15-year-old boy? It was the book that kept me thinking of him. It didn’t seem to fit the person I’d pegged him to be.

Sure, maybe it was on his reading list for junior English at his high school. But it’s July, for Pete’s sake. Plenty of time for further procrastination. And he wasn’t on the first page. He was into it. Way in.

He was reading a story of a young man who experienced incredible suffering in a place so wretched that it convinced him God could not exist. Maybe this skater-kid’s circumstances were crushing and bleak, too. Maybe he identified with the teenaged protagonist’s pain as he witnessed the horror of Auschwitz, wondering each day if death would come for him, as it had come for the rest of his family before his very eyes.

If you’re looking for hidden meaning here, I’m not sure there is any. But I’m pretty sure of this: I judge strangers too quickly, and on far too little data. I don’t know as much as I pretend to. And if I were to look carefully enough, often enough, I might glimpse the doorway into someone’s true story, and linger long enough to hear the tale.

I don’t want the kid I saw to conclude that God is dead. And I don’t want to conclude that it wouldn’t matter if he did. Because the difference between looking at something and really seeing, is like the difference between night and day.

For God, who said “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. (II Cor. 4:6, NASB)

©Leigh McLeroy 2004