Jitterbugging for Jesus

File this under “True story you won’t Belize.”

So last night I did my daily walking-jogging exercise thing and stopped in at the Chinese store to get some eggs and V8 for today’s breakfast and saw a Belizean guy who was one of the first people I befriended when I moved to the Mayan village of Succotz five years ago. He lived up in the bush and Succotz was the closest town to his nice house.

I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. He’s a nice, 30-something man. He was a hard-working bricklayer. He comes from a well-to-do family from near Belmopan, the nation’s capital.

Actually, he was a little arrogant and full of himself, and I knew that a lot of Belizeans around the village didn’t like him. But he was always friendly and courteous to me and I never saw anything but his best side.

So I’ll call this friend Joe.

Joe had a nice pickup truck. Years ago he took me across the border to Melchor in Guatemala, where everything is so extremely cheap including beer and food, to shop and drink beer and eat.

Like so many Belizeans of any means, he lived and worked in the States a few years but came back to settle down and marry a nice woman he’d met through his sister back in Belmopan.

Last night we talked outside the store a while and I said we needed to go back to Melchor some Saturday like old times, even though I don’t drink anymore.

“I don’t drink anymore either,” he said. “I wish we could go though. I can’t go to Guatemala anymore.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I’m still waiting for my trial and they took my passport from me.”

“Uh, what trial? What’d you do?”

“I stabbed a guy.”

(Picture me with my jaw dropping.)

“You stabbed a guy. Did you kill him?”

“Yes.”

“What the %!#%, Joe! What happened?”

“I was pretty drunk.”

“No dude, you had to be ugly drunk.”

“I know,” Mr. Paul.

I asked about his wife and kids. She’s divorcing him but lets him see the kids anytime he wants.

He lost everything he had–even his high-dollar, American-made pickup truck–to pay for a top-drawer Belizean City attorney.

“I don’t know what to say, Joe.”

“I know, Mr. Paul. It sucks, huh?”

He’s now living in San Ignacio in a rented cottage not too far from my house so I had him come over to my casa last night to talk.

He gave me a big hug and I prayed with him as he was leaving and he broke down crying. I asked him to come to church with me some Sunday and he said he will. (He told me once he’s not a churchgoer and doesn’t like the church. Hypocrites and all that, you know.)

When he left I tried to imagine the pain of the stabbing victim’s family (died the next day of multiple stab wounds, it turns out) but hated to see the pain in my friend Joe.

It’s a violent, messy world but I always say everybody in the world ultimately wants the same thing.

It starts with an L.