"The man in a suit"

"There's a man with a suit on.  He looks like he's in trouble.  Do you think we should help him?"  Those words were barely permeating my mind as I tried to dodge the rain in Barcelona.  Why did the normally sunny city of Barcelona have to choose today - our only full day to see the sites - as a day of rain? We were trying our best to stay under cover, since we hadn't worn our rain coats and we didn't want to buy umbrellas. With head down, I stood at the cross walk and I vaguely heard Lorraine say, "suppose we should help that man?"  And again, with more insistence, "There's a man with a suit on over there.  He has fallen.  Do you think we should help him?"

I ran over to where he lay.  He had tripped over a broken piece of sidewalk, fallen on his face, broken his glasses and had a good (but not dangerous) gash over his right eye.  We helped him up, made sure he was OK, and then went our separate ways.  There really was nothing special about this story.  A man in a suit had fallen and injured himself, we helped him up, shook hands like old friends, and parted ways.  Almost everyone I know would have done the same thing.  After all, a man had fallen and was injured ... "A man in a suit". 

On the surface, I did every thing right.  What bothers me as I replay that scene in my mind, is that I know what was going through my mind in the nano-seconds before responding.  I was thinking of the man I had seen just three days before in Santiago. Standing outside a grocery store, wolfing food down like he might die of starvation within seconds.  Besides being hungry, he was obviously well past the point of total inebriation and could hardly stand.  I remember thinking, "I hope he doesn't fall ... at least until I'm out of sight ... because I don't think I want to help him."  I didn't think this at the time, but I might as well have: "He doesn't have a suit on."

Back to Barcelona - while I rushed to the aid of "the man with the suit on", I actually thought of a YouTube experiment I had recently seen.  Maybe you have watched it as well.  The one where they dressed a man in a suit and had him stumble and fall to see who would help.  And then they dressed a man like a beggar, and had him fall, to see who would help.  

And I remember thinking, as I rushed to help "the man with a suit on" that I hoped these two events weren't on YouTube, because if they were, the man with a suit wins again, and the preacher on vacation still has some explaining (and some soul searching) to do.  

How much easier it would have been had Jesus said, "Love The Lord your God with all ... AND love the man in a suit the way you love yourself."