About two weeks ago Morgan and I were having a delicious pizza dinner when we received a knock at the door. It was a young man working for a group called KLMN Reader Services. He said it was a work program to help people get back on their feet and find work (they were selling magazines). When I asked how he got connected with this company, he replied that he had been out of work for a while and saw an ad in the paper for a sales position with them. He seemed like a very nice guy, but I was definitely wary about the whole thing. Perhaps it's the cynic in me, but I just had a bad feeling about the situation. He had a really shady looking clipboard sheet about the company and receipts that didn’t look very legitimate. I ended up giving him a check for $20 for a subscription that’s supposed to go to the hospital down the road.
As soon as he left, though, I went inside and “googled” the company. It seems that I wasn’t the first to be scammed by these people. There’s report after report of people getting ripped off by this company and their workers and every story sounds about the same. People never received magazines, couldn’t get refunds, the phone numbers for the company were not legitimate - they even tried drawing funds of $70,000 from the account of one lady who wrote a check to them.
I immediately had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. At that point, it wasn't so much about the loss of money, but the violation of trust between two people. I think God uses moments like this, though, to remind me that I'm called to something greater than guilt over the loss of $20. I guess if we hold a right view of our resources, the money was God's to lose anyways.
The lesson for me laid more in the calling we have as Christians to give all people the dignity and respect they are due as children of God, despite their efforts to deceive. My gut reaction was that this guy was a liar, a cheat, and definitely a scammer. All of my common sense told me this. But something else made me stay on the porch a little longer and hear him out, and I think it nothing less than God's work in my own life to change my heart towards others. I suppose that it's not so much about whether or not we avoid injustice being done to us (albeit this was very minor), but more about how we honor God in the ways we interact with and even think about other people. I, too, am a liar, cheat, and scammer . . . that's the reality of my own fallenness. And so, if it were to happen to me again, I hope that I would be wise with the money God has given me, but also extend the same love that God has extended to me.
That's the lesson I learned from a scammer.
