Bumble Bee

Come.

In keeping with my commitment to write men in white* with whom I had a relationship at least once every two months, I wrote a man who had not been in my family at the four-day retreat I participated in at the Torres Unit**.  I had met him when he was serving as a waiter in the Officers’ Dining Room.  He had one of those magnetic, unforgettable personalities.  The man in white didn’t write me back.  I continued to write him periodically.  One day I included a Rumi poem with my letter

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.”

I got a letter back—“You won’t quit writing me. I don’t even know you. I don’t write Church people.  But you won’t quit. That poem came when I needed it.  God is putting you in my life, I won’t resist.”

Some months later I attended a Saturday event at Torres. I saw this man in white coming at me like a bumble bee heading for its target—great smile, wide open arms.

*In Texas prisons, all inmates wear white.

**Torres Unit is a Texas state prison near Hondo, Texas.