by John Singarayar SVD
My grandmother had a gift that made people uncomfortable. She would stop, right in the middle of whatever was happening, and look at someone the way most of us are too busy or too frightened to look at anyone. Not a glance. Not the polite, sliding eye contact of strangers. A full, unhurried look, like she was trying to remember someone she had almost forgotten. And then she would walk over. She always walked over.
I asked her once why she kept interrupting her own life for people she barely knew. She dried her hands on her apron and said, without any drama at all, “Because somebody has to. And I’m already here.”
I have spent most of my adult life trying to become the kind of person who walks over.
I’m not there yet. That’s the honest part.
There’s a moment in Acts 1 that I’ve read a hundred times and only recently stopped rushing past. Jesus has ascended. The disciples are standing there, completely still, staring into the sky with the kind of expression you can’t manufacture, the look of people who have just witnessed something that broke every category they owned.
And two angels appear, not with fanfare, but with a question that sounds almost tired of waiting: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?” [Acts 1:11]. I used to read that as correction. Now it sounds to me like something my grandmother would say. Not unkind. Just done with waiting for you to notice what’s right in front of you.
Jesus never let wonder become a permanent address.
He pulled fishermen off boats before they’d finished processing the catch. He sent the 72 out while they were still nervous [Luke 10:1]. He told the man he healed to pick up his mat immediately, while the feeling was still fresh.
The pattern never changes. An encounter with God doesn’t end in stillness. It ends with feet moving toward someone who needs them.
I learned this the hard way on a Sunday morning I almost wasted.
The service had been one of those rare ones. The kind where the music opens something in your chest you forgot was closed, and the prayers feel like they’re actually going somewhere instead of bouncing off the ceiling. I walked out full. Genuinely full, the way you feel after a meal with people you love. And there was a woman sitting on the curb outside, crying into a phone that had already gone dead. I saw her.
I want to be clear about that. I saw her, and I kept walking for about four steps before something stopped me. Not inspiration. Not a voice. More like the memory of an apron and two dried hands and a sentence I’d heard 20 years ago.
I sat down beside her on the curb.
I don’t remember everything. I remember she was behind on rent. I remember she laughed once, suddenly, and then looked almost startled by the sound of it, like she hadn’t heard herself laugh in a while and didn’t quite trust it. I remember thinking, somewhere in the uncomfortable middle of that conversation, that this felt more honest than anything that had happened inside the building behind us.
Jesus said, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” [Matthew 25:40].
He didn’t say whatever you felt during worship. He didn’t say however long you stood with your eyes closed. He placed himself inside the hungry, the stranger, the one everyone steps around. He said, in language plain enough to sting: I’m already there. You’re the one who needs to arrive.
That one sentence rearranges everything.
God isn’t waiting only at the altar. He’s on the curb. He’s in the back pew, held together by routine and quiet desperation. He’s in the face of the man who comes to church every Sunday not because he’s certain of anything but because he cannot survive another week of no one knowing his name. He was already with that woman before I sat down. I didn’t bring him there. I just finally stopped being somewhere else.
The early Church understood this with a simplicity that convicts me. They had no buildings, no platform, no polished strategy. They had a risen Lord and the unshakeable conviction that mercy was not optional [Acts 2:44–45].
Persecution scattered them, and wherever they landed, the gospel travelled the only way it ever really travels, through one person sitting down with another, staying longer than was comfortable, and meaning it [Acts 8:4].
Isaiah said it centuries earlier and it still hasn’t softened: real faithfulness feeds the hungry, houses the homeless, and breaks chains [Isaiah 58:6–7]. James said faith that watches need walk past it isn’t weak faith. It’s no faith at all [James 2:17].
I don’t think either of them was trying to shame anyone.
I think they were just tired of people staring at the sky.
My grandmother died on a Wednesday, which felt wrong because Wednesdays were ordinary and she was not. At her funeral, I lost count of the people I didn’t recognise. Strangers who cried like family. A man who drove four hours because she had once sat beside him in a hospital waiting room for an entire afternoon and never once looked at her watch. I didn’t know about that afternoon until he told me at her graveside, and I stood there thinking, that was just a Tuesday to her. That was just somebody who needed somebody.
The angels weren’t wrong to interrupt the disciples. Wonder is not the enemy. It’s fuel. It’s the thing that reminds you who you’re following and why. But fuel is only meaningful when something moves.
And outside, right now, someone is sitting on a curb.
You’re already here.
