Last Sunday I began the story of Chuck, the homeless man who collects treasures in his shopping cart. Below is part 1 of this story. Each week I will add a new chapter to the story, with the hope that we can become treasure-seekers like him.

I saw him downtown pushing a grocery cart loaded with stuff, junk really. I wasn’t going to say anything to him, but as I passed by, he looked at me and asked, ‘Scuse me sir, do you have the time?’

I noticed then that he was adjusting the time on a clock in his hands. ‘Its 3:30’, I answered, seeing the time on the town hall clock tower down the street. That’s all I was going to say, but what he said next caught my attention.

‘Thanks sir. I want to remember the exact moment God gave me the time of day’, and he set the clock to 3:30.

Intrigued, though still hesitant to talk with him, I asked, ‘ah, how did He do that?’

And so began a conversation I’ll never forget.

‘Well’, he said, ‘I was pushing my treasures here, like I always do, and I saw some stuff at the side of the road, mostly garbage. But sitting there with it was this here clock. Now I had just been thinking about how God has blessed me with all these treasures, when BANG, there it is, this clock. I looked up and laughed and said, ‘thanks for the time o’ day, God’.

Looking at the clock, I noticed it wasn’t working, that the time was still set at 3:30.

‘The clock needs a battery,’ I said.

‘But that would ruin it’, he replied. ‘I want to remember the exact moment God gave me the time of day’. He pointed at the clock face, ‘3:30.’

I have to admit, I was thinking that he wasn’t all there, and so I started to keep going, mumbling ‘well, have a good day’. But he just kept talking, ‘have you got any treasures?’

Before I could answer, he went on, ‘these are my treasures’, indicating the cart filled with stuff. I stood there, a bit awkward, as he grabbed an empty toolbox from the cart.

‘Here’s my toolbox. No tools yet, but I figure He’s still working on that. This reminds me that He’s still got a job for me to do… just not sure what it is yet.’

‘See this roller skate? I used to have two. It was faster to get around on skates. But one day some punk stole them from me, grabbed them and ran off. I couldn’t catch him, and I was mad, I swore at him good! The next day I found this skate in an alley.’ He smiled, pointed up, and said, ‘that’s one down, one to go!’

He kept on showing me his treasures: a bag of clothes, a coffee maker, some old records, a winter coat, some wood scraps, pictures and frames, and scraps of cloth. All kinds of stuff – his treasures.

As he talked, I kept thinking about who he was, where he was from, and where he lived. But I was scared to ask. I smiled as he talked, asked questions, and more and more became intrigued by him, and the strange – yet profound – way that he looked at things. The way he talked, this guy was rich, and happy. He seemed so much more happy with his ‘treasures’ than I was with mine.

‘This is my family’ he said, holding a framed picture of a what hardly looked like him now, with a woman and three young children. ‘Not sure where they are now, we’re not together right now’. I could tell by how he said it that there was a painful story there.  ‘They’re my greatest treasures…’

Just the way he said it, made me think of my family, and my eyes started to tear. I had to go. ‘Thank you so much for sharing your treasures with me. You are a rich man!’ I said, feeling the irony of my words as I said them. ‘I’ve got to keep going… But thanks again. I hope you find more treasures today’. I felt stupid saying that, but he smiled.

As I turned to go, he picked up the clock and asked, ‘what time is it?’

‘Ten to four’, I replied.

He proceeded to change the time on the clock, and said, ‘thanks for giving me the time of day.’

I walked away, feeling like I was the one who had just been given a treasure.