Scum

I used to work with this guy who was, well, I'm not sure, slow, I guess. His name was Tim and his job was to sweep the plant. All night long (we worked afternoon shift) Tim would sweep and smoke cigarettes and collect pop bottles. Tim was about 6'2" and weighed maybe 150 dripping wet. Many of the guys in the steel factory were not nice to Tim. He walked funny, kind of a stride with his cigarette dangling from his mouth, his long nappy hair and nasty beard flowing in the breeze. Tim rode a bike to work and it was an old bike with baskets for his returnables. Tim had bad breath and chunky stuff caught in his beard from his previous meals. Tim was weird. In the beginning I was mean to Tim. I would drive my Hi-Lo at top speeds through his just swept piles of dirt, laughing all the way. I would break my bottles rather than give them to Tim, just out of spite.

Then this guy got a hold of my heart and stories like:

¹³Then Jesus went out to the lakeshore again and taught the crowds that gathered around him. ¹⁴As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at his tax-collection booth. "Come, be my disciple," Jesus said to him. So Levi got up and followed him. ¹⁵That night Levi invited Jesus and his disciples to be his dinner guests, along with his fellow tax collectors and many other notorious sinners. (There were many people of this kind among the crowds that followed Jesus.) ¹⁶But when some of the teachers of religious law who were Pharisees* saw him eating with people like that, they said to his disciples, "Why does he eat with such scum?" ¹⁷When Jesus heard this, he told them, "Healthy people don't need a doctor--sick people do. I have come to call sinners, not those who think they are already good enough." _{Mark 2:13-17NLT}

Tim would have been eating with Jesus.
Eating, laughing, picking food out of his own beard and being loved by the son of God at his table.

…..I was such a scum.