In New York City, the police advise you not to take out your wallet when approached by a beggar. The obvious reason is that you might be mugged and robbed. Steve Lipman, however, had no such misgivings about a young black woman, shy and rail-thin, her matted hair covered by a scarf, who approached him in the nearly empty Times Square subway station while he was waiting for a train.

Without giving it a second thought, Steve took out some dollars from his wallet and gave them to the woman, enough to buy a meal. From what he could see, she needed something to eat. No good work, he was taught as a child, goes unrewarded. Steve was not just a believing Christian, he was a practicing one. For him, faith without good works was dead (James 2:26).

Then Steve noticed the woman’s feet. She was wearing threadbare sneakers and had no socks on. He asked her why. “I have no money for socks,” she explained, with a touch of embarrassment. Steve had no more money either to give her but the vision of her sockless feet accompanied him all the way home.

When he got home, he rummaged through his dresser for several pair of new, thick socks and put two pair in a plastic bag. He waited for the woman for several days in the same place, at the same time, but she never showed up. Unwilling to give up, and unable to linger on the platform, he brought his little package up a flight of stairs to the clerk who worked in the token booth. Though they had never spoken, they did have a smiling relationship. The woman knew his face, and smiled as usual.

He asked her to open the booth’s side door, and handed her the bag with this assignment: “Please be on the lookout for a thin, black homeless woman who comes to the station in mid-afternoon and has no socks.”

Steve’s schedule kept him from that subway station for several weeks. When he finally went by her booth again, the clerk excitedly waved him over. “The young homeless woman never showed up,” she said. “But the day after you left the bag two homeless men knocked on the booth’s door and said their socks were wet, their feet were cold, and did I have any dry socks? It looks like the Good Lord had other plans for your good deed. So I gave those men your package,” she said.

Steve then realized it is God who is glorified by his good deeds, and while “man disposes, God disposes.”

The clerk had never seen those men before, she assured Steve. She had worked at that station for many years, and no one had ever asked her for dry socks before.

Steve felt a burst of elation and inner freedom when he realized that God directed his gift to others in need. God had other plans for Steve’s good deed which went to two homeless men who, out of the blue, came knocking on the door of the token booth for dry socks.

This story goes to show that faith, joined by the good works of love, is not dead but imparts life.

—Fr. Hugh Duffy