Reflection

"Are You Jesus?"

A stranger. A fallen basket of apples. And a small girl's question that has followed grown men for decades.

The story goes like this. A group of salesmen are at the airport, rushing to catch a flight home for the weekend. They've already said their goodbyes. They've already let go. They are not slowing down for anything.

As they run for the gate, one of them clips a small table by accident. A basket of apples flips over and rolls across the floor in every direction. A young girl is standing there, frozen. The apples were hers. She had a sign — she was selling them, the kind of fundraiser kids do.

The other salesmen keep running.

But one of them — one — stops.

He waves the others on. "Catch the flight. I'll catch the next one."

He goes back. He kneels down on the cold airport floor. He starts gathering the apples one by one. Some are bruised. Some are split. As he picks them up, he notices the girl is crying quietly. He looks at her and realizes she's blind.

He pulls a few twenty dollar bills out of his wallet, hands them to her, and says, "Here. Please take this for the apples that got hurt. I hope this didn't ruin your day too much. Are you okay?"

She nods.

He stands up to leave.

And as he starts to walk away, she calls after him with a small, uncertain voice:

"Sir... are you Jesus?"— a blind girl at an airport

He froze. He didn't know what to say.

That's the whole story. And the lesson is simple and almost unbearable: when you stop, when you kneel, when you give back what was lost — somebody is going to ask if you are Jesus.

You won't be. You're you. But for one moment, in one little corner of someone's life, you'll have looked like Him. And that is enough to change a day. Maybe a life.

That's the whole forever business right there.