CREEDE HINSHAW: An undramatic nudge

Last week I slept in a tent a block or so outside of downtown Macon, one small part of a ninth annual sleepout to raise money and awareness to address homelessness in central Georgia. I had successfully avoided participating in the first eight of these annual events. A February campout, with its unpredictable weather, has never been on my bucket list. Even a June campout, with the promise of mild weather, isn’t really high on my priority list any longer.

It’s often rather mysterious what motivates a person to volunteer for something like this. The quick answer people often advance is that “God told me to do this.” And I suppose I could use those words; it would seem natural, after all, for a preacher to attribute this very slight deprivation to the call of the Divine.

But it’s probably a lot more complex than that. I never heard a voice say anything to me. Or if I did hear a voice, I can’t remember how it sounded or what it said. If one takes that phrase literally, I have never heard the voice of God, although I have often felt promptings and nudges that seem to have come from the hand of this loving, involved Lord.

As best as I can reconstruct it, I was prompted to pitch my tent poles downtown thanks to a flier delivered to my house by the United States Postal Service. It was a postcard-size invitation, mass-mailed, inviting me to participate in the sleepout. That was it.

It doesn’t sound very dramatic to credit a bulk mail postcard to tipping the scales of my soul, but that’s how it happened.

On the day I brought that piece of paper into the house I was receptive. I don’t know why I was receptive that day. I don’t know why I didn’t toss that invitation into my recycle basket. But I read the invitation and knew that it was going to involve me.

A simple postcard battered my defenses and my successful eight years of avoidance of that campout skidded to a crashing halt.

I have recently been remembering a first cousin who is homeless, a schizophrenic wanderer who may be — for all I know — buried in some unmarked grave. Maybe that was a factor. I have been thrown in what seems like almost daily contact with lonely street people in fleeting, yet significant ways. Maybe that was a factor. I have wondered what one person could do to alleviate suffering in this richest nation on earth. Maybe that added to the postcard’s impact.

Perhaps all those things were in the back of my heart and mind. But the short answer — which is what most people are interested in — is that the mail person delivered a post card to my house and a couple of days later I was registered to raise money and go camping for one night.

That doesn’t sound like much of a story, but of such commonplace promptings life is changed and lives are changed. This column — in all its ordinariness — could be one such nudge.