Tonight, I met a man by the name of George Drain. I was sitting in my truck parked aside a gas pump at some junkyard gas station when George approached me. Now usually when you see a frail and tiny fella with a crooked walk rambling towards you, your first instinct may be to floor it (or at least while parked inside the geographical arena of the boonies), but I was tired and George was pretty stealthy for an old timer.

When he approached my window he raised his hand as if to inquire of me, or perhaps he thought I was your local taxi-man out looking for the tireless folk; nevertheless, I lowered my window and acknowledged the man.

“Hey there, sir,” he said.

“My name is George Drain.”

He carried a yellow envelope in his right hand with a stack of white paper stashed inside. He sported a lavender button down, which he tucked inside a pair of sullied khakis, held firm by a charcoal belt. "A workman’s attire," I thought to myself, yet by the looks of it, he was closer to the crypt than a shovel.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

He opened the envelope and handed me four sheets of paper. All four had a different word at the top in bold and a small passage typed below. At the bottom of each sheet, it read: Written by George Drain. Friend of God – For Almighty God. They were poems.

I knew then that the man wanted me to buy these supposed poems from him. I glanced at them all glaringly, pretending that I believed this to be more than a hustle for my precious, failing treasure.

“How much do you want for these, sir?” His eyes bloomed with curiosity and excitement, “Ah, just give –

“I've got five dollars in change right here. That's all I have.” Yes, I was telling the truth, all I had besides that was my debit card. I handed him the money and he bid me well and I did him the same.

As he was walking away, I googled his name and a few lines from each poem, in an attempt to proclaim him as the gypster of all Montgomery Exxon’s, but all I did was empty my data tank a bit more (go figure.) So I rolled the window up and placed my phone in the passenger seat and buckled the seat belt, then all of a sudden, George was standing there again as if he was inspecting my paint job. I rolled down my window.

“Hey, hey, young man, can you please do me another favor?”

I wanted to be mad, but for some reason, I don't think George would have cared.

“Yes,” I said.

He pointed his withering, dark fingers westward, beckoning as if he knew the way to Shangri-La . “Can you take me just down the street here?”

Without knowing how far “just down the street” was, I agreed.

As I mentioned before, George was a smaller man, and he looked like a boxed-up, grimly-faced teenager when I glanced over at him in the passenger seat. Oh, but he was far from the days of "good ole boy," and we fastened seat belts. I asked him where he was from and he told me that he was born and raised in Montgomery, which seemed kind of odd to me considering his accent and the eloquence of his speech. Not to say that the people of Montgomery do not speak eloquently, but the southern United States as a whole is known for its drawl and worded imperfection. But George, while not necessarily graced in the art of grammar, did speak with a voice worth noting.

“How long have you been in Montgomery?” asked George.

“I have been here for three years.”

He glared at me, “Oh!”

“Yes. I'm from Georgia. Rome, Georgia.”

George unfettered his mouth and began to smile rather deeply.

“Man, I had a girlfriend from Rome, Georgia,” He said. “When I lived in Detroit, I dated a girl from Rome.”

I just laughed silently as I considered the possibility – but only for a second until I realized he was full of it.

“Well, what's your name?”

I turned to look at him as we casually cruised down Fairview avenue, “Jay.”

He smiled with a docile grin. “Well, that's easy to remember. I mean who can forget Jay?”

"You'd be surprised," I thought to myself. We continued to talk as George told me of all the places he had lived: Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, just about every city that has a star beside its name on the country map, he named. When we finally reached our destination, which was another gas station, I parked the vehicle to let George out.

“Well it was nice talking to you, sir,” I said. I began to reach out to shake his hands but George’s eyes were fixed on something other.

“Hey man, what about all those pennies?” He inquired freely.

The change holder contained about 100 or so pennies that he was alluding to.

“Yes sir. You can have it all.”

I hate pennies and I wanted to have them gone. It felt like I had released a horde of copper demons from that truck.

As I was scraping up all the change, George began to recite a poem, which he called, “Dedication to The Son of God.” As each and every word uttered from his mouth, I began to realize that this man was in fact gifted. He recited the entire poem without any sort of break or hesitation, yet each and every word flowed smoothly out of his mouth as a river flowing over a cliff.

After I scraped up the last of the change, I handed it to him and asked him to recite a specific part of the poem again so that I could write it down. It reads:

“But when a man strays far away,

and goes a very long way from home,

My Jesus gets him and leads him right back home.”

So maybe George did live in the Motor City for a time. And maybe he roved the streets of Madison and Manhattan, too; even so, he's now home. And whether or not if he actually lived there, or in Montgomery his entire life, doesn't matter to me. Regardless, he still needed to be led, as do we all. <Before George closed my door, he said to me that God led me to him. But I could say the same for him, and in fact, I did. Because we are all searching for something. Some go abroad to find their lot, some remain and consider that whatever needs to be found will find them. But when the search ends, the search for a home begins. Who's going to lead us back? Who's going to be there to pick us up after we fail? I believe God sent George Drain to remind me of that tonight. And knowing that God will never lead me astray gives me the courage to leave home and the wherewithal to share that comforting feeling with others, just as George did with me.