By Daniel Johnson-Kim, Sports Editor

I’m not what you would call a “God person.”

I don’t go to church, I rarely pray, I don’t read the Bible and I frequent the nosebleed section of Moody Coliseum during Chapel.

But despite that spiritual synopsis, a recent encounter I had in Washington D.C. pushed me to question my position on God.

While at a conference in the District, I met a homeless man who shined shoes in front of one of the city’s most glamorous hotels. With a smile on his face and a rag in his hand, he sought business from welldressed pedestrians passing by.

And more times than others, he was ignored.

Despite being ignored, he looked content and was not offended by uninterested people passing by or the cab drivers mocking him in front of the hotel; he was just there to do his job.

The first time I spotted the shoe-shiner he was outside of a restaurant blocks away from the White House – he worked the mornings and afternoons at the hotel and nights at the restaurant frequented by D.C.’s richest.

After introducing myself, he lost interest when he looked at my feet and saw my street shoes; there was no money to be made from me.

I promised a shoe-shine rain check, and little did I know when I cashed it, much more than a streetside shoe-shine was in store.

The shoe-shiner was in his usual spot on my last day in D.C., and luckily, I was equipped with the two ingredients needed for service: dress shoes and $4.

As he buffed and wiped my brown hand-me-down dress shoes the conversation turned from his 27 years of experience shoeshining on the streets to my experience in D.C.

So I told my story of a summer spent working at Street Sense, a non-profit newspaper that covers homelessness in D.C.

And that’s when it happened. For a moment time froze, the cars on the street stopped moving and the homeless shoe shiner dropped his rag, rose his head and looked straight into my eyes.

He became a theologian.

“There’s a reason people do good things like that,” he said as he glared into my soul. “And that reason in a higher power, that’s the only place good things like that come from.”

Shocked by the sudden shift of conversation and eerie look in his eyes, I nodded my head like a scared child and handed him the $4 in my pocket.

Walking away, a combination of confusion and shock consumed my thoughts.

Had the spiritual rhetoric come from any other source, I would have brushed it off.

But I couldn’t ignore the message of the shoe shiner. Maybe it was serious eyes or the hurt in his face, but something got through.

I’m not saying I’m ready to lead singing in chapel, but this had to be some kind of a sign, a sign that requires some thought.

Hopefully one day I’ll figure out what happened, but until then it’s the nosebleed section of Moody for me.