One of the down parts of being a pastor is the calls I get from strangers wanting me to rescue them. Some of these calls are legit, but many are scams. If I do give in and get scammed, it's a guarantee word will get out and the calls will multiply. Some of the calls are easy to reject. My favorite was the man who called me one winter morning to ask me if I remembered him from Sunday morning worship. He kept insisting he'd met me the previous Sunday morning. Because of weather, attendance had been extremely light that day. I finally said, "Look, the roads were bad so there weren't many people who made it Sunday. We didn't have a single visitor." He paused for a moment, then asked the name of the church. "OH! I don't know why the operator gave me this number. I asked for the Baptist Church in Tiny Village." Then he hung up. I didn't have time to point out to him that we were the only church in Tiny Village.
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Sometimes it's harder to know if the need is real or not. Yesterday evening I got one of those calls. My gut tells me the guy is scamming, but he does such a good job it's hard to say no to this guy. He's been calling off and on for months. There are parts of his story that are a little bit off. It changes in subtle ways each time he calls me. I have to give him this, he is persistent. Very persistent. The first time he called he'd just moved back to the area because his wife had taken him for everything in an ugly divorce following the death of their only child. The judge had been totally unfair and left him with nothing.
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He has family in the area, but they have disowned him because he left their church. Last night he told me he has cancer and will be having surgery next month. We generally don't assist people, we refer them on to agencies in Town that we support with food collections and money. Of course, he wasn't asking for money last night, just guidance as to where he could get a gas card so he could go to work, because he has a job delivering newspapers. He needs to work and keep this job because it keeps his mind off his cancer, which is probably terminal. Every suggestion I offered he had thought of and he had a reason why it wouldn't work. He couldn't go to the homeless shelter because he had severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from working as a cop and couldn't sleep in a place with other people around. He kept making vaguely suicidal comments.
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I finally got another phone call and had to end our conversation. I promised him prayers, and hung up convinced it was a scam but with a nagging doubt. What if his story was true? What if the whole world was against him? What if I was the only person on the face of the earth willing to listen to him? This is the part of ministry I hate most....
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