His eyes flickered from intense focus to shivering uncertainty and confusion. They were red and looked tired.
“So you’re here for an expungement?” I asked at the worker’s rights clinic where I was volunteering on Saturday.
“Yeah….I just heard you get your criminal record cleaned up here…” he answered.
“Well, we might be able to help you with an expungement but it depends on a few criterion,” I responded, trying to follow his ever-changing line of vision. I then explained the process to him---you can’t get your criminal record “cleaned up” if you committed a felony or served prison time. I then discovered, unfortunately, that he had both on his record.
"What was the violation code?” I asked, filling out a form.
“Well, I assaulted a police officer with a deadly weapon,” he answered.
Oh crap. I thought, hoping he didn’t get so upset about the results of this meeting that he decided to stalk and kill me later.
I then explained that he could file for a certificate of rehabilitation, but he couldn’t get the felony off of his record.
Four times.
Each time I finished explaining he responded with:
“But I just want it so like, if I wanna get a job, they can’t pull up my record and see that….”
A piece of my heart ached for the man’s situation and the desperation leaking through his voice. Scenes from Les Miserables blinked through my head.
After our meeting he had to fill out a form that asks “Why did you come into the clinic today?”
His response?
“For a sponge.”
Something about that encounter made me think of the brothers who asked for seats at either side of Christ. Jesus said that they didn’t know what it was they were asking.
The man didn’t know what he came to the clinic to get---a sponge, a clean record, a piece of paper freeing him from his past. But he had an idea of what he wanted the outcome to be.
I think sometimes we come to God with requests for an outcome, but really have no idea what it is we are asking. We have an idea of what we want, but if we only grasped the seriousness, the ludicrousness, the futility of what we were requesting, we might not ask it.
The best part about it, I think, is that even though we are so unclear about what it is we need from him, and half the time ask the wrong questions, he still listens.
