Meeting Robert

From October 2012 to January 2013, we decided to take a plunge and rent a kiosk at the Muncie Mall for a side business that we had. For those several months we spent many hours at the Muncie Mall sharing about our business. Day in and day out I sat at the kiosk and talked with people as they came by.  And during that time, I saw the Jamaican flag EVERYWHERE!  On T-shirts, on purses and bags, on hats.  Honestly, at least once a day someone would walk up to me or walk by me clad in black, yellow and green.  It became kind of a game to me to see where Jamaica would pop up next!

Enter Robert: Next to our kiosk was a large bench for tired husbands to wait while their wives scoured the stores for just the right Christmas gifts.  One day I turned to look toward that bench and my eyes just about bugged out of my head.  Here on the bench was a short, slender black man, with dread locks down his back, dressed in Jamaican gear from his hat to his tennis shoes!

I marched right up to him to introduce myself and he told me that his name was Robert.  Robert is from Jamaica and lives in Muncie.  According to others that I talked to later (just to make sure that I wasn’t dreaming) Robert is likely homeless and is seen all around Muncie, although I had never laid eyes on him before.  Robert and I swapped stories for at least a half hour about different places on the island, where the best jerk huts are, and where to wreck dive near the airports.  Robert promised to come back to talk to me and share pictures of his homeland, but to this day I have not seen him again.

Months later when Bruce and I were deciding that we definitely needed to wait for at least 10 years or more to go back to Jamaica, he would pull into his rented and designated parking space at his office downtown, and Robert would be standing in it.  Bruce called me, obviously somewhat shaken, to announce to me that we were most certainly going to move forward in whatever capacity God chooses to show us!