Big Hands

My one-year old twisted away from me on the driver's seat as I tried to change his diaper, making a messy job difficult. Not only difficult but a spectacle. We'd stopped at a rest area just north of Henryville, Indiana, and though it was busy with Colts fans headed to Indianapolis for game day, I didn't worry about who might be watching until a shiny black crossover slowed to a halt behind my dirt-covered SUV.

The driver had his window down, and instead of a jersey wore a light blue button-up with a loose collar. He waved me over. I told him one moment while I put pants on my toddler, expecting only a wink and a wry comment about the mixed blessings of children, but then, as he waited, I caught a glint pass from this right hand to his left. On his palm lay something yellow.

I picked up my son and went over.

When I got there the driver placed in my hand a gold chain. He had another around his neck and from between his buttons peeked a gold medallion. He said in a deep, unfamiliar accent, "I am from Dubai. I have my wife and everything with me." He gestured to a passenger in a floral dress, then the trunk where a pale blue mattress lay high and flat. He said, "I am stuck here, and I need a little cash. Take it." He motioned at the chain. At the end of it was a yellow ring the size of a golf ball.

I hesitated. I'd gotten emails that started that way. Odd to get spam in person, though, and to feel the weight of the offer on my palm. I couldn't guess his angle. I put the chain back in his hand.

He reached for his cupholder, said something, and the passenger handed him a white box. He held it out to me. "Take my AirPods."

I declined.

Again he put the gold chain and giant ring in my hand.

I stood, my one-year old on my hip, and weighed the situation.

I used to go to a downtown church. Street people often circulated through the parking lot asking for money, but the deacons said not to give them any, they would just use it to buy alcohol and cigarettes. So I never gave them anything.

Then one quarter the Bible study was "The Least of These." A big-name pastor preached, without hesitation, that we shouldn't give even clothing to street people because they went out and pawned it for cash to buy drugs. We had a responsibility, he said, to protect the resources of the church.

Protect it for who? I wanted to ask.

I walked out on that pastor, and a few weeks later when a beat-up old junker rattled through the parking lot with a driver asking for gas money, I didn't wave him off and scurry down the sidewalk but instead wrestled with myself, squatting on the curb outside his passenger window and interrogating him about where he was going and did he really have no other way to get there. When I ran out of questions, I stared at the asphalt under his tires. Finally, I surrendered a ten. I think it was more than he expected. I walked on, and have never missed any of those dollars.

As I stood at that rest area with my son next to an Arab trying to give me a gold chain, I didn't think of that moment in the church parking lot, but I did think of a quote from Aesop I'd read the day before. "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."

After a week on the road I didn't have much in my wallet, just a couple of tens. The man still tried to give me the chain, and still I gave it back to him. Finally he accepted it, and as he parted he grasped the tiny hand of my son and said, in his thick foreign accent, "One day you too will have big hands."

I'm tall, over six-foot-six, so I took his words literally, but later I wondered if "big hands" might be an Arabic idiom for generosity. I looked it up when I got home. The closest I found was a Chinese saying, "big hands big feet." It means someone whose hands are so big money easily slips through. Wasteful.

Well, maybe it's true. Maybe generosity really is a wasteful failure of stewardship, and charity is abused by the people it's meant to help. But the author of Hebrews wrote that in showing hospitality to strangers some people have entertained angels. I'm ashamed to think how the angel in the rattletrap had to pry ten dollars from the fist of a churchgoer, or the angel stranded in America only got twenty. So even if my friend at the rest area was slipping an insult under the cultural divide, I choose to take his parting words as a blessing.

I hope my son does grow up to have big hands.