It’s been two weeks since Sam has been “homeless.”
Driven away by his family for repeated substance abuse and violent behavior, Sam loitered around San Francisco looking for food. Usually, he finds food at the Embarcadero. If not, he’d queue at the shelters for free meals.
At night, he would rest his tired body at the Golden Gate Park blending with the other homeless people getting their night’s sleep on park benches.
Sam was distraught. He wanted so much to go back to his family but he is uncertain if they would take him back. After all, he has been causing nothing but pain, fear and anguish to his wife and three kids for l0 years. Even his own mother refuses to take him in.
It was in one of these nights, at the darkest corner of the Golden Gate Park when Sam found himself praying: “Dear God, please keep my family safe. Please give my wife Miriam a kind heart to allow me to come back and start anew. Give me strength to battle my drug addiction and make me the husband and father that I used to be. Lord, make me a new man.”
Shortly after this prayer, he noticed a woman and her child sitting on the opposite side of “his” bench.
“What are you doing here? You should be with your family,” Sam recalled the woman asking him. That triggered a long night of conversation where Sam comfortably opened up his heart to a total stranger.
At the end of their conversation, the woman handed Sam a black blanket with the logo of the Oakland Raiders, saying: Go home to your family. Oakland Raiders happens to be Sam’s and his family’s absolute favorite football team.
For the first time since he’s been homeless, Sam confessed that he slept soundly through the night, with the blanket providing him the warmth and the opportunity to unload of his burdens giving him peace.
As soon as he woke up, Sam decided he will go back home and will beg his family for forgiveness. He searched around the park for the mother and child to thank her for the eye-opening conversation and for the Oakland Raiders blanket. He even asked around the other regular homeless people at the park if they had seen the woman and child but all of them said they’ve never seen the mother-child pair who Sam spent priceless moments with at the bench.
It was then that Sam realized God sent him an angel and he was so sure of his steps on his way back home. His family accepted him back. Sam became a new man, just as he prayed. And to this day, Sam still keeps the Oakland Raiders blanket given to him by his angel at the Golden Gate Park.
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”
(Hebrews l3:2)
