Short Story: The street corner preacher meets up with a drunkard, who wasn't really a drunkard at all.

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Alf Goetherly had a passion for trying to convert people to Jesus Christ. He used to speak loudly on a particular street corner, in his large city, near the Post Office, as many people would pass him by there. The thing was though, with his loud, dogmatic preaching, he turned people off, and away from Jesus Christ, more than he ever attracted anyone to his faith. He kept going though, twice a week, faithfully, spruiking his wares, for a long period of 25 years. He never looked back, over all of this long time period, to see if his talking had ever really worked. If he had done so, he would have seen, that not one person, not even one, had approached him, ever, for further details, and for help to follow his way. Then, one day, a local drunkard, rolled over to this would-be preacher, and took a pew, at his feet. The drunkard looked up at the preacher, with blood-shot eyes, and said to him, these words: "A loud mouth, like yours, only ever moves you further away from others. Only a soft heart can draw people nearer." "You hear, and see nobody around you. You only hear yourself. Your mind deafens you to the truth of others around you. You only hear your own thoughts too loudly." "I have learned that the point of life's talk is not where, or how often, I move my mouth, but how often that I am moved in my heart. If I talk, and only annoy others, my talk is wasted. If I talk only from myself, but not really to others, I say nothing to them." The preacher stopped preaching. The drunkard's words were getting through to him. They made sense. He stepped down from his wooden box, and he sat on the pavement with the drunkard. He said, "Tell me more." The drunkard looked him in the eyes, and said, "You must talk from your heart of love, not from your mind of empty words. Only such words coming from your heart fill people up with that same love." Then the drunkard got up, and walked into the Post Office, disappearing from the preacher's sight. The preacher went home, and he never preached again. He simply became a drunkard himself too. The preacher got the wrong message again. The words are not needing alcohol to come from the heart, only less mind attached to them, which was the case now, but less heart is attached too, when you are drunk. This apparant drunkard, that the preacher had met that day, was no real drunkard, but a passing Sufi spiritual man, by the name of, Murshid Akbar Moleni. Alf had had another chance to turn his life around. Sure, his life was changed, dramatically so, by his encounter, with this disguised Holy Man, but he read the wrong message, and copied the apparent truth, rather than the real truth. We need to follow our own real truth of ourselves, not to try to copy anyone else's truth, even if it is the truth of such a Holy Man, as this Sufi Saint was. Photo Credit: The photo used in this article was sourced from the free media site, pixabay.com The Sufi Saint fleeted in, and then fleeted out of the Preacher's life. Any forthcoming change in the Preacher's life, was then left entirely up to him, but the catalyst had been given to him to change, in the right direction, if he chose to do so.