He said, “If he shows up here I’ll have to tell him why the church board really asked me to leave, and it was because of what I did for his mother.” I stood in the doorway holding the letter he had written for me twenty-six years earlier. He looked at it and immediately knew why I had come. I asked him what my mother had to do with his leaving, and he sat down before answering. He told me that after my six weeks in the church basement, my mother had come to him and begged him not to let me come home. She had admitted that she was afraid of my father, and Pastor Kim had helped her find a place to stay without telling anyone in the congregation. The church board eventually discovered he had used church resources to help my family without authorization.
He told me they gave him a choice: stop helping us or resign. He chose to resign. I asked why he had never told me, and he said because I was twenty and already carrying enough shame about needing a place to sleep. He didn’t want me believing that my family had ruined his career. Then he showed me a folder containing the original letter to the landlord, the apartment application, and a note my mother had written to him. She had thanked him for giving her children somewhere safe to go, but she had begged him never to tell me because she didn’t want me knowing how frightened she had been. I looked at him and said, “You lost your church because of us.” He shook his head and said, “No. I lost a church that wanted me to choose between helping someone and protecting its reputation.”
I handed him the laminated letter I had carried for twenty-six years. I told him it was the reason I had eventually become a landlord myself, because I wanted to give people the kind of chance he had given me. He started crying and said he had wondered all these years whether what he did had mattered. Then I gave him the letter I had written over Christmas. It said, “You probably don’t remember me as clearly as I remember you, but I built my entire life from the six weeks you gave me.” He read it twice without speaking. Before I left, he hugged me and whispered, “I never wanted you to know what it cost.” I told him, “That’s the part I came here to tell you—you paid the cost, and I spent twenty-six years making sure it wasn’t wasted.”
