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<\/a>By Chad Thomas Johnston<\/p>\nHe was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not<\/em>. Six or seven years ago, a coworker of mine played a drunken game of chicken with a semi-truck on his bike at ten o\u2019clock at night. His funeral doubled as a memorial service and an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.<\/p>\n My coworker, whom I will refer to as Flip, was an adjunct member of the faculty in the same university department that employed me as a lecturer. Flip was in his early forties, wore horrible Hawaiian-print shirts, and spoke with the glibness of a used car salesman.<\/p>\n \u201cGot any advice on how I can butter up the ol\u2019 boss and get a full-time job like yours?\u201d he once asked me.\u00a0Nope, not really, Flip.<\/em><\/p>\n I refrained from attending his funeral, but two of my coworkers went\u2014out of obligation more than anything else. Neither of them knew him particularly well. They drove home absolutely gobsmacked by what they beheld that night.<\/p>\n A woman who never met Flip, who probably only attended the event for the AA meeting, offered to improvise a song in his honor based on one of the psalms. The pastor who officiated over the funeral did not know Flip either. Midway through the funeral, he announced his intentions to adopt Flip\u2019s children since no relatives had come forward to file for custody. When the AA portion of the event began, one of the group leaders noted Flip had not attended a meeting in months.<\/p>\n When\u2019s the last time any of you saw Flip?<\/em>\u00a0I imagined him saying.\u00a0I doubt he ever dreamed he\u2019d attend his next meeting in a casket.<\/em><\/p>\n My coworkers left the funeral feeling like Flip had not left much of an impression on anyone. In my mind, he had been a greasy blotch on the fabric of the faculty in my department. I guess if he was a human stain, he was the kind that came out in the wash with ease.<\/p>\n Fast-forward six or seven years to the day before Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n My friend and former coworker Bryan, who attended Flip\u2019s funeral, sent me a text saying another coworker of ours\u2014a man as slippery and strange as Flip\u2014had died at the age of fifty-one after the onset of a sudden illness.<\/p>\n This coworker\u2014a man I will refer to as Al\u2014had also reminded me of a used car salesman. His comments about women were as ugly and outdated as the plaid suits worn by the cartoonish hucksters on TV. An adjunct member of the faculty like Flip, Al had asked Bryan for advice on landing a full-time teaching position at the university.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know what to tell him, Chad,\u201d Bryan said to me. \u201cI don\u2019t think he\u2019s going to get that position.\u201d<\/p>\n Even though Al annoyed me, I knew Bryan considered him a friend\u2014at least insofar as one can befriend a person one pities. It humbled me to see Bryan reach out to a man I dismissed as a reject.<\/p>\n When Bryan called to invite me to see the film\u00a0Dodgeball<\/em>\u00a0with him and Al, I reluctantly agreed. I knew Jesus loved rejects, and I figured I should, too.<\/p>\n Al smuggled a package of Twizzlers into the theater. After sharing his candy with us, he snickered, \u201cThose Twizzlers were in my ass!\u201d He\u2019d apparently seen one too many films depicting drug mules hiding forbidden cargo in bodily cavities. Even though he clarified that he\u2019d only stuffed Twizzlers down the back of his pants, I was in no hurry to eat more.<\/p>\n I was in even less of a hurry to be Al\u2019s friend after that. Bryan and I laugh about this incident now. \u201cI hope he didn\u2019t try to smuggle any Twizzlers into the afterlife.\u201d We have nothing else to say, I suppose.<\/p>\n Sometime before I left the university to pursue a PhD I would never obtain, Bryan told me Al\u2019s wife was thinking of leaving him. Al laughed when he told Bryan about it, but I suspected grief bubbled beneath the surface like black oil. My heart ached for Al, and I had no idea why.<\/p>\n The next time I thought about Al was when Bryan told me he had died\u2014some six or seven years later. Even though I thought of Al as a reject, I felt a surprising sadness when I learned of his demise, which only increased when I realized his obituary did not mention a wife.<\/p>\n As I think about Flip and Al now, I see how inaccurate I was in appraising their worth. I realized almost immediately after hearing about Al\u2019s passing that I felt loss over his death because he had been worth something all along. He and Flip were both bearers of God\u2019s image, and created to love and be loved by God and humanity.<\/p>\n When I encounter people like Flip and Al in the future, I hope to remember the words of musical maverick Larry Norman, the godfather of Christian rock. On his deathbed in February of 2008, he said, \u201cI feel like a prize in a box of Cracker Jacks, with God\u2019s hand reaching down to pick me up.\u201d<\/p>\n The image of God treasuring a rinky-dink trinket from a box of Cracker Jack has stayed with me ever since I read about Norman\u2019s passing. It makes me think of Jesus, who saw worth in people where others only saw worthlessness. I, too, want to see \u201cthe least of these\u201d as beloved by God\u2014jewels not to be mistaken for junk.<\/p>\n Al\u2019s obituary described him as Catholic. I know nothing of Flip\u2019s religious background. I can only hope that when God removed them from this life, he regarded each of them as a child regards the plastic ring he finds under clusters of caramel corn and peanuts: with a bliss that would baffle any jeweler.<\/p>\n Originally published in\u00a0<\/em>Good Letters\u00a0on<\/em>\u00a0January 16, 2013.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Chad Thomas Johnston<\/a>\u00a0is a slayer of word dragons who resides in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife Rebekah, their daughter Evangeline, and five felines. He has written for\u00a0Image Journal\u2019s\u00a0Good Letters<\/em><\/a>\u00a0blog,\u00a0In Touch\u00a0<\/em>magazine,\u00a0The Baylor Lariat,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<\/em>CollapseBoard.com<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>Johnston\u2019s first book, the whimsical memoir\u00a0Nightmarriage<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>was a finalist for a 2013\u00a0Shirley You Jest!\u00a0Book Award in nonfiction writing.<\/p>\n
\n\u2014Isaiah 53:3<\/p>\n