Ordinary Time
Stories
Contents
"Ordinary Time" by C. David McKirachan
"Who's the Fool?" by C. David McKirachan
"Sharing the Light" by Sandra Herrmann
* * * * * * *
Ordinary Time
by C. David McKirachan
Isaiah 9:1-4
I like the liturgical calendar. It gives the year rhythm. It drags us through the scriptures in ways that we, in our horrific, grinding normality could never pull off. We're too busy paying attention to the normality of staff issues, the church's corporate business, deadlines, pastoral emergencies, the list we have on the kitchen table that keeps the house from falling down. The Sunday's after Epiphany and before Ash Wednesday are known as the Sunday's after Epiphany. I use themes of being a light to the world, evangelism, arising and shining. We use white as its color, and we hang a big fat gold star from the chandelier in the sanctuary.
There are some folks in the congregation who want to call this Ordinary Time, go to green, and get the star off the chandelier as soon as possible. Now I understand their reticence to celebrate, to shine, to be involved in evangelism. None of that is comfortable for the frozen chosen. But I have chosen this seemingly silly field to take a stand. I know it would be more virtuous to have a fight over children's sports on Sunday, minimum wage, or gossip, but I choose this fight because I see one of the priorities of my ministry to be, "To comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable." At this time of year the Christmas tree is debris, Santa is back to silly, and angels are just plain out of season.
Okay. But there's a danger in this rapid retreat from the season of miracles. Too often, the magic it brings goes with it. Christmas and its cousin Epiphany demand we at least acknowledge the glory of God's presence. They rain down on us like some divine monster dandruff, slowing down our normality, short circuiting our efficiency, melting our cynicism. Incarnation is a touch away.
I have a hard time calling any moment of life, Ordinary. And I am very happy that the Holy Spirit got among the lectionary committee. They brought Isaiah 9 back into this time when it's cold outside and the church calendar is back to being a traffic jam. So proclaim! Celebrate! Arise and Shine! For unto us a child is born! There is nothing ordinary about that, and there never will be.
Who's the Fool?
by C. David McKirachan
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
I think the issue had to do with how the stars and stripes were being flown in front of the church building. No one told me, but it was being used to try to get rid of me, my pastoral leadership, and all it represented. Evidentially, they were planning on presenting a petition to fire me at the annual meeting.
They goofed when they called a member, a Marine who'd served two tours in Vietnam. He'd seen and experienced things no human being should. Periodically his wife would call me, "He's out on the rock again." If his daughters got into an argument, he would very quietly get a beer out of the frig and go out the back door into the woods behind his house. He'd walk to a good sized rock in the woods and sit there, drink his beer, and wait to stop shaking. I usually got there before that happened. Post-traumatic stress syndrome is weird. It reaches out of buried memories and drags the victim back into the horror of then, demanding center stage, erasing all other priorities, or at least mangling them. The Marine was back in Vietnam. Slowly but surely, with a lot of help from other veterans, he was coming home.
He was a Giants fan. I was too. He called me "Coach." He used to say I was okay for somebody who liked granola. One dim evening while on the rock he told me that he had my back. "Don't worry Coach, nobody will ever get to you. I got you covered." Nobody in the congregation knew about the rock or his promise to me.
He called me one evening, telling me he'd been contacted by another member of the church because the caller and others considered the Marine to be a real American. He listened, as I'd told him to do, even if he disagreed. "Listen as long as you can or until they stop speaking. Then respond verbally, leave, or both." So he listened and then told the guy on the phone that if he went after me, he'd have to get through a Marine, and hung up. Then he called me, told his story, and told me he was on the way over. And then he hung up. When he got there, we went up in my tree house and had a beer.
What we were working out was how to calm down enough to keep in mind that whether or not our friend on the phone was nuts or how angry, hurt, or self-righteous the Marine and I felt, we were all on the same side. Our job was not to win any argument but to hold fast to the crucified Christ. Pretty foolish for a strategy, right?
There was no petition presented at the annual meeting. My pastoral visit to the person who'd called the Marine was pretty awkward, but there was no mention of the flag or the way it was being flown. I got the Boy Scouts to take care of that. They're good with flags. The Marine took me to a Giants game and we screamed ourselves hoarse. We may have to love our brothers and sisters in Christ, but the Philadelphia Eagles? I don't think Paul mentioned them.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
Sharing the Light
by Sandra Herrman
Matthew 4:12-23
Van was a big, heavy-set man, easily over 6-foot-2, with arms that looked a lot like Popeye's. I had never seen him really angry and was glad I hadn't. Not that he was a deliberately intimidating person; he wasn't. He was, in fact, a huge guy who sat six rows back every Sunday with his wife Vicki and three teen and near-teen aged kids. They were not the kind of people you think have ever run aground.
One Advent, I decided to try something different for the sermons: rather than the pastor, the congregation would tell something of their walk with God. There were some looks of consternation, but Van seemed interested. In fact, he waited patiently in the back of our country church and said, "Could you come to my house and talk with me this week? I'd really like to tell my story next Sunday." Although I assured him that whatever he said, was fine with me. "Yeah, pastor, but my wife wants you to tell me that it's okay to say what I want to say to the community."
I went to his house, heard his story, cried with him and Vicki as he told me, and I said, "You will be very well received, I'm sure. Even though no one here knew you in the bad times, I think you'll find there are others who have also suffered the way you have. They, at least, will be grateful that you told your story." This is Van's story:
Van was alternately abused and neglected in his childhood. His father was an angry man who alternately drank and beat up his wife and all of the children, but especially Van, who was the second son. He felt his father was impossible to please: not with good grades, not with playing sports, not when hunting or fishing, not in helping around the house and barn. Any false step, and a fist could come out of nowhere, temporarily blinding him, breaking his nose, knocking the breath out of him.
His older brother tried his best to protect their mother, pulling her out of harm's way, taking the blows meant for her whenever he could. Van would warn his sisters whenever he could that the old man had been drinking, so they could hide or get out of the house. Then, one day, a social worker showed up at the door with three burly men in uniform, and they removed the girls and questioned the boys, and at last arrested his father, but only after he had bloodied the nose of one officer and was handcuffed and loaded into a police car.
Van and his two brothers were put into the same foster home, but his sisters went to live with an aunt and uncle 300 miles away. The foster home was "okay, as those things go. At least they left me alone, didn't beat me up when I screwed up, which I did fairly often." Van grinned. "But I got my GPA up from a 1.5 to a 3.0 (out of 4 points)! Amazing what a difference it makes in a guy's study habits when he's not having to duck."
"Or hide," his wife added.
After high school, Van kicked around. He didn't really want to go to college (he'd gotten his grades up, but he had no love of books even so). He also had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Finally, he joined the navy, and went to see the world. He wound up off-shore of Vietnam for a little over six months. The tedium of sitting and waiting for something to happen got to him, as to so many other men not fighting in the jungles. He took up smoking pot, which was cheap and easy to get. Most of his buddies did the same, and their officers either didn't notice, looked the other way, or joined in. When he was transferred to the Philippines, he drank, smoked, shot up, and used women. By the time he was discharged, he was a wasted, angry man. "Like my father, I guess."
He came home to a country that was as angry as he was -- angry about the war, fearful of a government that seemed to be getting out of the control of the people, and often taking it out on the returning soldiers. He wound up on the street, sleeping in doorways and under bridges, moving when threatened or it got too cold.
Then, one night, a woman approached him. Not like the usual women who would come and offer to keep him warm if he had any money or even a sandwich to share. This woman came bearing food for him and a new, warm blanket and the offer of a bed to sleep in if he cared to come in out of the cold.
"I actually had to think about that," Van said. "You get used to sleeping outside, believe it or not. Going inside means there's no air moving. And the overwhelming smell of people who haven't washed in a long time, all cooped up together. Not to mention the fact that they never turned off all the lights at night. It was for our own protection, so none of the crazies could creep up on you at night. Out under the bridges, it gets dark at night. And if you camouflaged yourself enough with black plastic bags or other trash, nobody could find you."
At last, he decided to take her up on the offer. She took him to a van, got him settled inside, and went back out. Soon she was back with another man and then another. Van sat, a mug of coffee in his hands, breathing in the warm vapors, while other men came in and squatted in the back of the van. The men were taken to a small, gray building at the edge of downtown where they were escorted to a shower room and given shampoo and body wash and told they could take as long as they needed to get clean. He took twenty minutes, worrying every second that they'd tell him that was long enough, he had to stop.
This was followed by clean underwear, socks, shirt, and pants. He took his shoes in his hand and followed the woman into a large hall where he was given a full plate of food "and Oreos! I'd been at feeding programs in the city, and you almost always get homemade cookies, never Oreos. It was great!" He slept on a real bed for the first time in a year. "It was really hard to fall asleep. It was, if you can believe it, too soft for me. I kept turning over and finally bunched up the pillow with my shoes under it, and that's the way I slept."
The people who had found him told him he could stay for up to a month, but only if he would talk to a psychologist and a social worker every day, take a shower every day, and go to worship every evening. "I was totally wiped out," Van said, "a shrink? That was just about a no-starter for me. I did not need a shrink, and I said so. Loudly. But the young woman just kept smiling, and said, ‘It's that or the street. Your choice. Personally, a week in a bed and a shower every day would make me put up with almost anything.' "
Van finally agreed. He talked to the shrink. He talked to the social worker. He cried. He yelled. He went to worship. He sat in a corner and watched the activity around him. Sometime during the second week, the chaplain came and sat down next to him. "He never said a word, he just sat there. It was amazing. Everybody else was trying to talk to me or trying to get me to talk, but this guy just sat there. Finally, I looked at him, and said, ‘What d'ya want?' He just shook his head, ‘Nothing. I'm just here, sitting with you so you know you're not alone.' I started to laugh at him, but I ended up crying. He put an arm around me and just let me cry. And then, when I was done crying -- at least for the moment -- he said, ‘I want you to know that you're loved, not judged.' And that was the beginning of my new life."
The chaplain eventually -- days later -- invited Van to meet Jesus. They read the passage from John 3:17 that says: "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." Then they read Matthew 4:16-17: "...the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.... [So] repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near."
Van looked up and said, "I read it, and I understood. I was one of those who sat in the darkness, in the shadow of death. This chaplain was saying that Jesus could shine a light into my darkness. He said all I had to do was to take a chance one more time. Because, he said, Jesus never fails us.
"I just shook my head. My mother was always quoting the Bible. Much good it did her. By the time my old man was in jail, she was pretty crippled up, physically and emotionally. I told him that. I had to think about it. He said, ‘Okay. Take your time. God has all the time in the world.' I got up and walked away. I got a coat off the rack and went outside. I walked down to the corner, around the block, until I realized that my ears were freezing. I walked back to the club and was let back in. When I hung up the coat I'd taken, it hit me like a ton of bricks. The club let me back in, even when I had walked away! If they could do that, maybe this Jesus they talked about would do the same thing. I went into the chapel and knelt down and asked Jesus to heal me. I expected a vision or a touch from God, a voice, something. But nothing spectacular happened. But when I stood up, I knew that I was forgiven. Something shifted. I don't know how else to say it.
"I had another interview with the psychologist, and then talked to the social worker. I got a job, then another job. Eventually, I met my wife, here. She worked at the front desk, I worked in the back. And after that, it was all downhill. Uh, I mean, uh, not downhill, but not the struggle, you know. Oh, heck..." Both of them dissolved in laughter.
"It's all been good," said Vicki. "He tells this story, and I can hardly believe it. I've never seen even the slightest sign of the guy he says he was. He's wonderful with our kids -- just the sweetest dad in the world -- and he's kind to everyone, including me." She took his hand, and they smiled at each other as though they hadn't been married yet, let alone seventeen years.
The next Sunday, he stood up and told his story. You could see the shock and surprise on the various faces of the congregation. They'd never known about his background. But the judgment that Van had feared was completely absent. After church, several people surrounded him for some time, talking quite earnestly until I came near. At that point, they smiled and walked away.
"So? How did it go?" I asked.
Van smiled. "You were right, pastor. There were several people here who needed to hear my story. Others who have sat in the darkness, like me."
"Yes, but you shared your light."
"Oh, yes." He took Vicki's hand, gestured to their children, and we all walked out into the sunlight. He put his head back, closing his eyes as his face was bathed in sunlight. I thought for a minute that I could see a halo around his head. But it was probably just a trick of the light.
Sandra Herrmann is a retired United Methodist pastor living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
*****************************************
StoryShare, January 26, 2014, issue.
Copyright 2014 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
"Ordinary Time" by C. David McKirachan
"Who's the Fool?" by C. David McKirachan
"Sharing the Light" by Sandra Herrmann
* * * * * * *
Ordinary Time
by C. David McKirachan
Isaiah 9:1-4
I like the liturgical calendar. It gives the year rhythm. It drags us through the scriptures in ways that we, in our horrific, grinding normality could never pull off. We're too busy paying attention to the normality of staff issues, the church's corporate business, deadlines, pastoral emergencies, the list we have on the kitchen table that keeps the house from falling down. The Sunday's after Epiphany and before Ash Wednesday are known as the Sunday's after Epiphany. I use themes of being a light to the world, evangelism, arising and shining. We use white as its color, and we hang a big fat gold star from the chandelier in the sanctuary.
There are some folks in the congregation who want to call this Ordinary Time, go to green, and get the star off the chandelier as soon as possible. Now I understand their reticence to celebrate, to shine, to be involved in evangelism. None of that is comfortable for the frozen chosen. But I have chosen this seemingly silly field to take a stand. I know it would be more virtuous to have a fight over children's sports on Sunday, minimum wage, or gossip, but I choose this fight because I see one of the priorities of my ministry to be, "To comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable." At this time of year the Christmas tree is debris, Santa is back to silly, and angels are just plain out of season.
Okay. But there's a danger in this rapid retreat from the season of miracles. Too often, the magic it brings goes with it. Christmas and its cousin Epiphany demand we at least acknowledge the glory of God's presence. They rain down on us like some divine monster dandruff, slowing down our normality, short circuiting our efficiency, melting our cynicism. Incarnation is a touch away.
I have a hard time calling any moment of life, Ordinary. And I am very happy that the Holy Spirit got among the lectionary committee. They brought Isaiah 9 back into this time when it's cold outside and the church calendar is back to being a traffic jam. So proclaim! Celebrate! Arise and Shine! For unto us a child is born! There is nothing ordinary about that, and there never will be.
Who's the Fool?
by C. David McKirachan
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
I think the issue had to do with how the stars and stripes were being flown in front of the church building. No one told me, but it was being used to try to get rid of me, my pastoral leadership, and all it represented. Evidentially, they were planning on presenting a petition to fire me at the annual meeting.
They goofed when they called a member, a Marine who'd served two tours in Vietnam. He'd seen and experienced things no human being should. Periodically his wife would call me, "He's out on the rock again." If his daughters got into an argument, he would very quietly get a beer out of the frig and go out the back door into the woods behind his house. He'd walk to a good sized rock in the woods and sit there, drink his beer, and wait to stop shaking. I usually got there before that happened. Post-traumatic stress syndrome is weird. It reaches out of buried memories and drags the victim back into the horror of then, demanding center stage, erasing all other priorities, or at least mangling them. The Marine was back in Vietnam. Slowly but surely, with a lot of help from other veterans, he was coming home.
He was a Giants fan. I was too. He called me "Coach." He used to say I was okay for somebody who liked granola. One dim evening while on the rock he told me that he had my back. "Don't worry Coach, nobody will ever get to you. I got you covered." Nobody in the congregation knew about the rock or his promise to me.
He called me one evening, telling me he'd been contacted by another member of the church because the caller and others considered the Marine to be a real American. He listened, as I'd told him to do, even if he disagreed. "Listen as long as you can or until they stop speaking. Then respond verbally, leave, or both." So he listened and then told the guy on the phone that if he went after me, he'd have to get through a Marine, and hung up. Then he called me, told his story, and told me he was on the way over. And then he hung up. When he got there, we went up in my tree house and had a beer.
What we were working out was how to calm down enough to keep in mind that whether or not our friend on the phone was nuts or how angry, hurt, or self-righteous the Marine and I felt, we were all on the same side. Our job was not to win any argument but to hold fast to the crucified Christ. Pretty foolish for a strategy, right?
There was no petition presented at the annual meeting. My pastoral visit to the person who'd called the Marine was pretty awkward, but there was no mention of the flag or the way it was being flown. I got the Boy Scouts to take care of that. They're good with flags. The Marine took me to a Giants game and we screamed ourselves hoarse. We may have to love our brothers and sisters in Christ, but the Philadelphia Eagles? I don't think Paul mentioned them.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
Sharing the Light
by Sandra Herrman
Matthew 4:12-23
Van was a big, heavy-set man, easily over 6-foot-2, with arms that looked a lot like Popeye's. I had never seen him really angry and was glad I hadn't. Not that he was a deliberately intimidating person; he wasn't. He was, in fact, a huge guy who sat six rows back every Sunday with his wife Vicki and three teen and near-teen aged kids. They were not the kind of people you think have ever run aground.
One Advent, I decided to try something different for the sermons: rather than the pastor, the congregation would tell something of their walk with God. There were some looks of consternation, but Van seemed interested. In fact, he waited patiently in the back of our country church and said, "Could you come to my house and talk with me this week? I'd really like to tell my story next Sunday." Although I assured him that whatever he said, was fine with me. "Yeah, pastor, but my wife wants you to tell me that it's okay to say what I want to say to the community."
I went to his house, heard his story, cried with him and Vicki as he told me, and I said, "You will be very well received, I'm sure. Even though no one here knew you in the bad times, I think you'll find there are others who have also suffered the way you have. They, at least, will be grateful that you told your story." This is Van's story:
Van was alternately abused and neglected in his childhood. His father was an angry man who alternately drank and beat up his wife and all of the children, but especially Van, who was the second son. He felt his father was impossible to please: not with good grades, not with playing sports, not when hunting or fishing, not in helping around the house and barn. Any false step, and a fist could come out of nowhere, temporarily blinding him, breaking his nose, knocking the breath out of him.
His older brother tried his best to protect their mother, pulling her out of harm's way, taking the blows meant for her whenever he could. Van would warn his sisters whenever he could that the old man had been drinking, so they could hide or get out of the house. Then, one day, a social worker showed up at the door with three burly men in uniform, and they removed the girls and questioned the boys, and at last arrested his father, but only after he had bloodied the nose of one officer and was handcuffed and loaded into a police car.
Van and his two brothers were put into the same foster home, but his sisters went to live with an aunt and uncle 300 miles away. The foster home was "okay, as those things go. At least they left me alone, didn't beat me up when I screwed up, which I did fairly often." Van grinned. "But I got my GPA up from a 1.5 to a 3.0 (out of 4 points)! Amazing what a difference it makes in a guy's study habits when he's not having to duck."
"Or hide," his wife added.
After high school, Van kicked around. He didn't really want to go to college (he'd gotten his grades up, but he had no love of books even so). He also had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Finally, he joined the navy, and went to see the world. He wound up off-shore of Vietnam for a little over six months. The tedium of sitting and waiting for something to happen got to him, as to so many other men not fighting in the jungles. He took up smoking pot, which was cheap and easy to get. Most of his buddies did the same, and their officers either didn't notice, looked the other way, or joined in. When he was transferred to the Philippines, he drank, smoked, shot up, and used women. By the time he was discharged, he was a wasted, angry man. "Like my father, I guess."
He came home to a country that was as angry as he was -- angry about the war, fearful of a government that seemed to be getting out of the control of the people, and often taking it out on the returning soldiers. He wound up on the street, sleeping in doorways and under bridges, moving when threatened or it got too cold.
Then, one night, a woman approached him. Not like the usual women who would come and offer to keep him warm if he had any money or even a sandwich to share. This woman came bearing food for him and a new, warm blanket and the offer of a bed to sleep in if he cared to come in out of the cold.
"I actually had to think about that," Van said. "You get used to sleeping outside, believe it or not. Going inside means there's no air moving. And the overwhelming smell of people who haven't washed in a long time, all cooped up together. Not to mention the fact that they never turned off all the lights at night. It was for our own protection, so none of the crazies could creep up on you at night. Out under the bridges, it gets dark at night. And if you camouflaged yourself enough with black plastic bags or other trash, nobody could find you."
At last, he decided to take her up on the offer. She took him to a van, got him settled inside, and went back out. Soon she was back with another man and then another. Van sat, a mug of coffee in his hands, breathing in the warm vapors, while other men came in and squatted in the back of the van. The men were taken to a small, gray building at the edge of downtown where they were escorted to a shower room and given shampoo and body wash and told they could take as long as they needed to get clean. He took twenty minutes, worrying every second that they'd tell him that was long enough, he had to stop.
This was followed by clean underwear, socks, shirt, and pants. He took his shoes in his hand and followed the woman into a large hall where he was given a full plate of food "and Oreos! I'd been at feeding programs in the city, and you almost always get homemade cookies, never Oreos. It was great!" He slept on a real bed for the first time in a year. "It was really hard to fall asleep. It was, if you can believe it, too soft for me. I kept turning over and finally bunched up the pillow with my shoes under it, and that's the way I slept."
The people who had found him told him he could stay for up to a month, but only if he would talk to a psychologist and a social worker every day, take a shower every day, and go to worship every evening. "I was totally wiped out," Van said, "a shrink? That was just about a no-starter for me. I did not need a shrink, and I said so. Loudly. But the young woman just kept smiling, and said, ‘It's that or the street. Your choice. Personally, a week in a bed and a shower every day would make me put up with almost anything.' "
Van finally agreed. He talked to the shrink. He talked to the social worker. He cried. He yelled. He went to worship. He sat in a corner and watched the activity around him. Sometime during the second week, the chaplain came and sat down next to him. "He never said a word, he just sat there. It was amazing. Everybody else was trying to talk to me or trying to get me to talk, but this guy just sat there. Finally, I looked at him, and said, ‘What d'ya want?' He just shook his head, ‘Nothing. I'm just here, sitting with you so you know you're not alone.' I started to laugh at him, but I ended up crying. He put an arm around me and just let me cry. And then, when I was done crying -- at least for the moment -- he said, ‘I want you to know that you're loved, not judged.' And that was the beginning of my new life."
The chaplain eventually -- days later -- invited Van to meet Jesus. They read the passage from John 3:17 that says: "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." Then they read Matthew 4:16-17: "...the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.... [So] repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near."
Van looked up and said, "I read it, and I understood. I was one of those who sat in the darkness, in the shadow of death. This chaplain was saying that Jesus could shine a light into my darkness. He said all I had to do was to take a chance one more time. Because, he said, Jesus never fails us.
"I just shook my head. My mother was always quoting the Bible. Much good it did her. By the time my old man was in jail, she was pretty crippled up, physically and emotionally. I told him that. I had to think about it. He said, ‘Okay. Take your time. God has all the time in the world.' I got up and walked away. I got a coat off the rack and went outside. I walked down to the corner, around the block, until I realized that my ears were freezing. I walked back to the club and was let back in. When I hung up the coat I'd taken, it hit me like a ton of bricks. The club let me back in, even when I had walked away! If they could do that, maybe this Jesus they talked about would do the same thing. I went into the chapel and knelt down and asked Jesus to heal me. I expected a vision or a touch from God, a voice, something. But nothing spectacular happened. But when I stood up, I knew that I was forgiven. Something shifted. I don't know how else to say it.
"I had another interview with the psychologist, and then talked to the social worker. I got a job, then another job. Eventually, I met my wife, here. She worked at the front desk, I worked in the back. And after that, it was all downhill. Uh, I mean, uh, not downhill, but not the struggle, you know. Oh, heck..." Both of them dissolved in laughter.
"It's all been good," said Vicki. "He tells this story, and I can hardly believe it. I've never seen even the slightest sign of the guy he says he was. He's wonderful with our kids -- just the sweetest dad in the world -- and he's kind to everyone, including me." She took his hand, and they smiled at each other as though they hadn't been married yet, let alone seventeen years.
The next Sunday, he stood up and told his story. You could see the shock and surprise on the various faces of the congregation. They'd never known about his background. But the judgment that Van had feared was completely absent. After church, several people surrounded him for some time, talking quite earnestly until I came near. At that point, they smiled and walked away.
"So? How did it go?" I asked.
Van smiled. "You were right, pastor. There were several people here who needed to hear my story. Others who have sat in the darkness, like me."
"Yes, but you shared your light."
"Oh, yes." He took Vicki's hand, gestured to their children, and we all walked out into the sunlight. He put his head back, closing his eyes as his face was bathed in sunlight. I thought for a minute that I could see a halo around his head. But it was probably just a trick of the light.
Sandra Herrmann is a retired United Methodist pastor living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
*****************************************
StoryShare, January 26, 2014, issue.
Copyright 2014 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
