I Am No Angel, He Said

By Bobby Neal Winters Published on May 25, 2018

I am now back from Paraguay.  It was a successful trip. Whenever I make a big trip, especially when I am alone in a foreign country, my skin gets thicker, and I become more aggressive. 

This I say only as an explanation. I am not sorry for any of it. If you don’t get tough and aggressive, then the airlines, the TSA, the customs folks, and your fellow travelers will walk all over you. This is not to say you have to be a jerk. But you have to mark your boundaries. I will teach this to my grandsons when the time arises, but I am telling you now.

I can’t just turn this off, but in a couple of weeks, I will be back to normal. In my travels, I’ve met a class of men — and there might be women like this too — who travel by themselves all the time. They travel in foreign countries. They put on this suit of armor so often they just don’t bother to take if off anymore.

One of These Men

I met one of these men in my hotel’s lobby in Encarnacion. He is a South African arms dealer, and a Boer, not an Afrikaner. It is a distinction that is important to him.

“I am no angel,” he said.

Well, none of us are angels, but with him I got the feeling I really didn’t want to know the specifics, so I didn’t ask. But I listened to him. This is one of the things God put me here for. To listen and to pick out what truth I can from what anyone says. And then to share it with you.

He spoke of his son, and his son’s education. He wanted his son to be able to work with his hands, to learn how to take care of himself, to learn how life really is. To learn how to be a man.

Whatever fell under the umbrella of “no angel,” here was a point of humanity.

I listened some more. He spoke of religion. He believed it was one of the problems with the world.  Too many people would go through their lives, get cancer, and then pray for God to save them. There were too many do-gooders who came into situations without knowing anything about what is going on and made the situation worse instead of better.

He then looked me in the eye and waited for me to say something.

Here I Was

I used to argue with people a lot more than I do now. Then I discovered that I learn a lot more by listening instead of trying to construct a counter argument.

But here I was. I remembered something from the Bible about the Holy Spirit telling us what to say at such times and I proceeded to speak. I looked him back in the eye and said, “Well, I should tell you that I am a religious man, but I agree with much of what you’ve said.”

Then I went on to share the tiny amount of volunteer work I’ve done with the poor at the Lord’s Diner, which is a place in my hometown where we feed the hungry, and similar situations, and the some good it has done for me.

He seemed to understand, and said he believed in that sort of thing too.

The conversation then drifted and we parted ways, as each of us had the work we were in Paraguay to do.

Things I Would Like to Tell Him

Now that I’m home, I will be slowly taking off the armor needed for speaking to such men. Soon I will be my old self again. And then I will be completely home.

But I’ve thought about the man who will never take off his armor, about the things he said, about things I would like to tell him were the opportunity to arise. My thoughts aren’t organized; maybe they never will be. I’d try to say something about God that might pierce his armor.

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