I've been texting a scammer.
It's not like I believe him or anything. But he has been scamming someone close to me. And ticking me off in the process.
He is in love. He cares for her heart. He will never do anything to tear her heart. "I prove to you I am real babe," he writes to me, in sentence patterns screaming this truth: He is not from San Diego, California.
He is not in the armed forces and on deployment in Afghanistan.
He is not using those iTunes cards sent to him for watching video games because the Army won't allow him access to his money.
The five phones he ordered on his victim's Verizon account are not for an orphanage of 25 children who can't afford phones.
He is not quitting the Army (or is it Navy? It changes.) to come home to marry anyone at a destination wedding in Hawaii.
There is no promised three-carat diamond ring cut in a heart shape.
And the pictures. The obviously cut-and-pasted photographs of his fresh, smiling face, that touch of gray, the exact same in every scene but pasted onto a real soldier's body.
It would be funny if it weren't so awful.
He is a fisherman in a sense, trolling his line out in the sea of women to find vulnerable ones, who are grieving and broken—and just. can't. see.
He is livid that I don't believe he is who he says he is. After going back and forth with him a few times, I have that funny feeling I had when I would engage my two-year-olds in an argument. "Don't get on their same level," the experts warned. "You're sure to lose."
So I remove myself from his level, this person committing crimes right in front of my face, crimes that are hurting someone I love. (I liken what I am experiencing to watching a thug take my grandmother's purse from her hands while I stand a foot away.) I back up a bit and try to disengage. You're not going to win this, I say to myself. So I text scammer-man this truth (after telling him his grammar sucks; the court reporter in me had to defend the English language!), "God sees real you and loves you."
I'm not expecting repentance from him.
But it felt good to speak truth into the situation, truth that is bigger than our lies, light that is brighter than the darkest, most remote places of our hearts.
I don't know whether he heard me. He didn't respond after that. But I heard me.
God sees real me.
God's light reaches into my darkest places, those places where I, too, just. can't. see.
God sees who I pretend to be, who I wish I were versus who I really am.
I don't know whether the words I texted reached Nigeria (or the Navy ship where "Romeo" is serving our country).
But the words reached me. God sees real me.
And loves me.
