Squabbling About Shorty
Stories
Contents
“Squabbling About Shorty” by David O. Bales
“Life-Saving Advice” by David O. Bales
Squabbling About Shorty
by David O. Bales
Luke 19:1-10
Gadi heard the angry voices behind him from across the courtyard. He saw the eyes of the two people he was talking with focus beyond him to the sound. Trying not to appear apprehensive, he began toward the problem, weaving through the small groups of Christians as they talked after worship. He shared their unease at any disorder. After the disastrous war against Rome Jericho was almost depopulated and few of those remaining were Christians. Sunday was the only time the handful of Jesus’ followers gathered and everyone remained jittery as they did so.
All of the two dozen people Gadi walked beside glanced nervously toward the turmoil in the far corner of the courtyard. He continued in that direction, trying not to alarm others. “Isn’t this what a pastor is supposed to do?” he prayed. The problem had to be dealt with because after Rome’s Tenth Legion joined in destroying Judea, its soldiers were still around, pensioned on Jericho’s plain to bring the land back into production as well as to preserve the bloody peace among the depleted citizenry.
Now Gadi saw that the disturbance was with Perahyah and Dosa. He continued toward them, passing the breach in the courtyard’s wall that still gaped like a wound from the Roman destruction. By appearing unruffled and gently extending his hand to those near him, he tried to calm others. He prayed again as he walked toward the altercation, “Lord Jesus, can’t we Judeans learn to live in peace? Lord, you’ve been here. You know us. Help us settle our disagreements without anger.”
He found Perahyah ranting. Perahyah seldom spoke sitting and when he spoke standing, despite his extreme age, he walked in place at the same time. Today, beyond any movement he’d ever exhibited while speaking, Perahyah banged his left foot at the end of every statement. “My father grew up with Shorty.” He spoke so forcefully that his stringy white hair flopped forward over his brow. “Nobody’s going to tell me otherwise.” He pulled his hair out of his wrinkled face. “Father said Shorty did crazy things when he was young, but in business, even his tax collecting, he was honest. And, everyone seems to forget, generous with the poor.”
He was raging at the equally aged Dosa who was able to stand by grasping onto his tall staff. He held near its top, looking as though he was climbing a rope. “I wonder,” he said, placing his cheek on his staff, “why you’re bringing this up once Zacchaeus has become the town’s dear deceased scoundrel elevated to a Christian celebrity. Was your father busy sticking up for him half a lifetime ago? Did you bring this up in the four decades since Jesus’ resurrection?”
“We didn’t need to,” Perahyah stamped. “Shorty was alive and could speak for himself. Did he harm your family? If your kin thought he was a tax-bandit, did they say anything before Jesus came to town? Anyone bring charges against Shorty then?” He pointed to Dosa and extended his finger into Dosa’s chest.
“Come on, Perahyah,” Dosa said and brushed away Perahyah’s finger. Doing so, he released one hand from his staff and lost his balance. He grabbed desperately to pull himself up again and pushed away help from those near him, “Who was going to stick his neck out so one of Rome’s flunkies could chop it off?”
“Sh, sh, sh,” Gadi now must intervene. He stepped up to them. “Can’t be starting things with the Romans again. Keep such talk quiet,” he said, shaking his head to show his seriousness.
Dosa, now on the defensive, looked quickly to his right and left and lowered his voice, “Zacchaeus was a crook. Ask anybody.”
“You’re profaning his life and character,” Perahyah said and stamped his foot. “My fellows,” he turned, speaking now in a grand manner to Dosa, Gadi and the few others moving toward the discussion. He swept his hand toward them, but didn’t touch Dosa this time. “It’s obvious that somehow people have created a wrong impression of Shorty … Zacchaeus. I’ve heard the chinwagging of people today — who never knew him, I might say — mix truth and legend. They’ve put together a nice little indictment, ‘Tax collectors are bad. Shorty was a chief tax collector, so he must have been terrible.’ Nobody has asked me. My father worked for him, I should know,” he thumped his sandal hard on the packed ground, making a loud slap.
Around the courtyard a handful looked away in embarrassment or fear, while others just glanced down to stay out of the fray; but, everyone was listening now. Dosa stared at Perahyah. “I wasn’t going to bring that up.”
“My father?” Perahyah screamed as he threw his arms outward and jumped so violently that Gadi feared he’d break his ancient bones. “You’re going to charge my father with crimes? That’s what you’re saying about Shorty, so that’s what you’re saying about my father.” He breathed deeply a few times and spoke a little quieter, “I admit I’ve waited too long to speak, decades late in mentioning the truth, but—”
Gadi edged between them. He wagged a wrist against each of them. “This would not please our Lord Jesus,” he said. He couldn’t look these two elders in their eyes, because this wasn’t usual for a younger person to scold older men.
“I’m just so disappointed,” Perahyah said, his shoulders sagging and not moving either arms or legs. “I’m disappointed in myself for not correcting our congregation before, but I’m also disappointed that people would create a bad person thinking it makes Jesus somehow better. You know: ‘the worse the person was before encountering Jesus, the more powerful Jesus must have been.’ Isn’t Jesus’ resurrection enough to prove his great power? Do we need to slander others?”
Dosa, as though searching for something to bolster his views, muttered, “Everybody says—”
“Then you’re charging my father with a crime,” Perahyah cut him off. “And,” he held his hands toward Dosa to stop him from responding “and you’re plainly saying I’m a liar.”
Everyone waited to hear how Dosa would respond.
Gadi remained between the two. Dosa looked down and shook his head as though trying to come up with more to say.
Gadi spoke, “We’ve got the story of Zacchaeus written now. Luke did that for everyone. Let’s listen to what he writes about Jesus and Zacchaeus.” He signaled across the courtyard for a boy to bring the congregation’s treasure, Luke’s codex. Everyone waited as Gadi balanced it on a stool and flipped past the middle until he found the place. Even though the codex was new, it had been used enough to open most naturally to the congregation’s favorite stories.
Twenty-five worshipers now waited in the courtyard’s corner as Gadi read it to them. Perahyah asked, “Does anything on that page say Zacchaeus was a bad man?”
“He was a chief tax collector,” Dosa said.
“No,” Perahyah said. “On the page. Does Luke say he was a bad man?”
“It says,” Dosa spoke with a smirk, “‘when he defrauds anyone.’”
“Look again,” Gadi said, “It is written, ‘if he defrauds anyone.’”
Dosa made a “hmm” sound.
“It doesn’t say Shorty confessed his sin,” Perahyah said, “although everyone thought he was a sinner. Doesn’t say Jesus forgave him. Didn’t have to. Jesus didn’t tell him to repent and didn’t tell him to quit his business.”
Dosa sputtered but found no way to respond. Gadi said, “Looks like Jesus restored a person unofficially but wrongfully charged. Let’s not make Zacchaeus super bad or super good. We’ll just praise Jesus for the way he brings new life to each of us. Leave it at that?” Everyone nodded, including Dosa, although he did so grudgingly.
Gadi encouraged Perahyah and Dosa to shake hands. Then he left them in the corner and approached a widow sitting across the way. As he walked to her, calculating how much of the group’s meager common purse he could grant her, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, thank you that we now have your life and teachings written. May your example and your words lead us in all we do, especially when we disagree with others.”
Preaching Point: No matter others’ bad opinions, Jesus loves and accepts every person.
* * *
Life-Saving Advice
by David O. Bales
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
“Mr. Boostrom treated Jedidiah as badly as he treated the two of us,” Sharon said.
“Right down to calling him ‘Jed,’” Harvey said, “which Mr. Boostrom knew Jedidiah didn’t like; but that was Mr. Boostrom. And Mr. Boostrom’s still infesting my mind. I mean, Jedidiah was protecting us as much as he could, and Mr. and Mrs. Boostrom were exploiting us; yet, they so thoroughly dominated us that I still can only refer to him as ‘Mr. Boostrom,’ not just ‘Boostrom’ or ‘Gaylen,’ certainly not ‘father.’”
It was May 1, 1942 and Sharon and Harvey, sister and brother, were on the rise above the farm where they’d been taken in by the Boostroms when their mother died in childbirth and their father abandoned them. They’d been snatched by the Boostroms because in 1932 farmers were going bankrupt in the Oklahoma dust bowl and the great depression. Sharon at 11 and Harvey at 12 had been prime workers: strong enough to toil but not old enough to resist unnatural demands for their drudgery. No matter what the Boostroms promised the sheriff who granted them custody, they never showed the children affection. Mules, pigs, cow and chickens needed to be fed. Cow milked, fields cultivated, meals cooked, house cleaned, clothes washed, crops harvested, produce canned, roof repaired. For the three years they labored there, another task always awaited them.
Harvey lowered his voice, “And we’re still deploying Jedidiah in our defense.” He looked squarely at Sharon, “Have you ever told anybody about this hell hole?”
“A little, but who’d believe it?” Sharon said. “That’s why I insisted we come here again. We survived because of Jedidiah and his name. How he loved his name. ‘From the Bible,’ he said: ‘the Lord’s Beloved.’ He cherished his name like a family heirloom, and told us that to God we were beloved too. Nobody else told us that. Always something to do and they pointed, ‘More over here.’”
Nine years after the two had finally escaped from the farm they stood now and gazed down at what had become near “ghost” quality. The house was burned to the foundation, the blackened chimney standing as a futile sentinel and the other buildings tumbling in. “There’s where the well was,” Sharon said. The Boostroms’ poorly growing garden had needed to be tended by carrying water from the well because the stream they’d relied on for irrigation had gone dry the year before and wasn’t refreshed the following spring. “About the only times Mrs. Boomstrom came to the garden was when I was weeding, irrigating, or picking. She’d point down, ‘More over here,’ as neutral as if she were a government inspector.”
“If it hadn’t been for Jedidiah,” Harvey said. He looked slowly right and left, taking in what had been the border of their world for three years. “He stepped between Mr. Boostrom and me more than once. I remember like yesterday that last time when I was plowing, and Mr. Boostrom followed me with his belt and whapped my butt anytime I let the mule go crooked. I was so excited to see Jedidiah’s long skinny legs as he ran wildly across the field to us — his hat flew off as he hopped across the turned ground and furrows — that I let the mule swing left farther than ever and Mr. Boostrom hit me twice more before Jedidiah got to us. I could tell he was planning to grab Mr. Boostrom’s arm, but chose instead to dive between us, with Mr. Boostrom seeing that if he hit me again, he could be killed.”
“‘Jed,’ he screamed, ‘get out of here. Nothing to do with you.’ Jedidiah stood there with a threatening look on his face and said, ‘You’re treating the boy worse than the mule.’”
“I wasn’t about to stay around, just clucked the mule and went on plowing, pretty grateful to Jedidiah.”
“I was over there by the pump,” Sharon said, “when I saw Mr. Boostrom, steadying his wife almost in front of him, right there by the chicken coop. He told Jedidiah he was letting him go. Just said he didn’t need him. True. By that time the two of us were as good as one strong hand. And if it’d been up to the Boostroms, we wouldn’t have had a chance even to talk with Jedidiah before they chased him away. But Jedidiah wasn’t going to leave until you came in from the field and nothing Mr. Boostrom said budged him from where he sat beside the barn with his scuffed brown grip, hat on, and coat over his arm.”
The brother and sister stood surveying the old farm. It was the anniversary of the day Jedidiah was fired. For two years in their youth he’d been their only touch with human kindness. They’d promised themselves they’d never forget that day and they knew today would be the last time they’d visit the scene of their servitude. Harvey was in the army and about to be shipped out to the war in the Pacific and Sharon was engaged to be married.
Harvey stared off toward the north field. “We knew we couldn’t get away from the Boostroms and Jedidiah had no right by family or law to appoint himself protector. He didn’t need fancy learning to tell us the two things we needed to cling to if we were going to survive. He just did it, like this was his divine mission. First, ‘remember you are God’s beloved children.’”
Sharon said, “It was a statement of who we really were no matter the circumstances, and they were pretty bad circumstances.”
“‘Then, let God make you worthy of his call,’” Harvey said. “‘Basically, this is what God gives you and this is what you do with it.’ Can’t imagine anybody saying anything that could’ve meant more. Kept us alive and hoping for another year until we escaped.”
They descended the hill and wandered the farm for a while longer, kicking their feet in the dust. Neither knew what awaited them with the United States at war across both oceans. They hugged and walked silently back to their car, ready to proceed their different ways along with the strong memory of a man’s love and advice that had guided them thus far and which they could only hope would serve them into the future.
Preaching point: Encouragement to be worthy of God’s love.
*****************************************
StoryShare, November 3, 2019 issue.
Copyright 2019 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.
“Squabbling About Shorty” by David O. Bales
“Life-Saving Advice” by David O. Bales
Squabbling About Shorty
by David O. Bales
Luke 19:1-10
Gadi heard the angry voices behind him from across the courtyard. He saw the eyes of the two people he was talking with focus beyond him to the sound. Trying not to appear apprehensive, he began toward the problem, weaving through the small groups of Christians as they talked after worship. He shared their unease at any disorder. After the disastrous war against Rome Jericho was almost depopulated and few of those remaining were Christians. Sunday was the only time the handful of Jesus’ followers gathered and everyone remained jittery as they did so.
All of the two dozen people Gadi walked beside glanced nervously toward the turmoil in the far corner of the courtyard. He continued in that direction, trying not to alarm others. “Isn’t this what a pastor is supposed to do?” he prayed. The problem had to be dealt with because after Rome’s Tenth Legion joined in destroying Judea, its soldiers were still around, pensioned on Jericho’s plain to bring the land back into production as well as to preserve the bloody peace among the depleted citizenry.
Now Gadi saw that the disturbance was with Perahyah and Dosa. He continued toward them, passing the breach in the courtyard’s wall that still gaped like a wound from the Roman destruction. By appearing unruffled and gently extending his hand to those near him, he tried to calm others. He prayed again as he walked toward the altercation, “Lord Jesus, can’t we Judeans learn to live in peace? Lord, you’ve been here. You know us. Help us settle our disagreements without anger.”
He found Perahyah ranting. Perahyah seldom spoke sitting and when he spoke standing, despite his extreme age, he walked in place at the same time. Today, beyond any movement he’d ever exhibited while speaking, Perahyah banged his left foot at the end of every statement. “My father grew up with Shorty.” He spoke so forcefully that his stringy white hair flopped forward over his brow. “Nobody’s going to tell me otherwise.” He pulled his hair out of his wrinkled face. “Father said Shorty did crazy things when he was young, but in business, even his tax collecting, he was honest. And, everyone seems to forget, generous with the poor.”
He was raging at the equally aged Dosa who was able to stand by grasping onto his tall staff. He held near its top, looking as though he was climbing a rope. “I wonder,” he said, placing his cheek on his staff, “why you’re bringing this up once Zacchaeus has become the town’s dear deceased scoundrel elevated to a Christian celebrity. Was your father busy sticking up for him half a lifetime ago? Did you bring this up in the four decades since Jesus’ resurrection?”
“We didn’t need to,” Perahyah stamped. “Shorty was alive and could speak for himself. Did he harm your family? If your kin thought he was a tax-bandit, did they say anything before Jesus came to town? Anyone bring charges against Shorty then?” He pointed to Dosa and extended his finger into Dosa’s chest.
“Come on, Perahyah,” Dosa said and brushed away Perahyah’s finger. Doing so, he released one hand from his staff and lost his balance. He grabbed desperately to pull himself up again and pushed away help from those near him, “Who was going to stick his neck out so one of Rome’s flunkies could chop it off?”
“Sh, sh, sh,” Gadi now must intervene. He stepped up to them. “Can’t be starting things with the Romans again. Keep such talk quiet,” he said, shaking his head to show his seriousness.
Dosa, now on the defensive, looked quickly to his right and left and lowered his voice, “Zacchaeus was a crook. Ask anybody.”
“You’re profaning his life and character,” Perahyah said and stamped his foot. “My fellows,” he turned, speaking now in a grand manner to Dosa, Gadi and the few others moving toward the discussion. He swept his hand toward them, but didn’t touch Dosa this time. “It’s obvious that somehow people have created a wrong impression of Shorty … Zacchaeus. I’ve heard the chinwagging of people today — who never knew him, I might say — mix truth and legend. They’ve put together a nice little indictment, ‘Tax collectors are bad. Shorty was a chief tax collector, so he must have been terrible.’ Nobody has asked me. My father worked for him, I should know,” he thumped his sandal hard on the packed ground, making a loud slap.
Around the courtyard a handful looked away in embarrassment or fear, while others just glanced down to stay out of the fray; but, everyone was listening now. Dosa stared at Perahyah. “I wasn’t going to bring that up.”
“My father?” Perahyah screamed as he threw his arms outward and jumped so violently that Gadi feared he’d break his ancient bones. “You’re going to charge my father with crimes? That’s what you’re saying about Shorty, so that’s what you’re saying about my father.” He breathed deeply a few times and spoke a little quieter, “I admit I’ve waited too long to speak, decades late in mentioning the truth, but—”
Gadi edged between them. He wagged a wrist against each of them. “This would not please our Lord Jesus,” he said. He couldn’t look these two elders in their eyes, because this wasn’t usual for a younger person to scold older men.
“I’m just so disappointed,” Perahyah said, his shoulders sagging and not moving either arms or legs. “I’m disappointed in myself for not correcting our congregation before, but I’m also disappointed that people would create a bad person thinking it makes Jesus somehow better. You know: ‘the worse the person was before encountering Jesus, the more powerful Jesus must have been.’ Isn’t Jesus’ resurrection enough to prove his great power? Do we need to slander others?”
Dosa, as though searching for something to bolster his views, muttered, “Everybody says—”
“Then you’re charging my father with a crime,” Perahyah cut him off. “And,” he held his hands toward Dosa to stop him from responding “and you’re plainly saying I’m a liar.”
Everyone waited to hear how Dosa would respond.
Gadi remained between the two. Dosa looked down and shook his head as though trying to come up with more to say.
Gadi spoke, “We’ve got the story of Zacchaeus written now. Luke did that for everyone. Let’s listen to what he writes about Jesus and Zacchaeus.” He signaled across the courtyard for a boy to bring the congregation’s treasure, Luke’s codex. Everyone waited as Gadi balanced it on a stool and flipped past the middle until he found the place. Even though the codex was new, it had been used enough to open most naturally to the congregation’s favorite stories.
Twenty-five worshipers now waited in the courtyard’s corner as Gadi read it to them. Perahyah asked, “Does anything on that page say Zacchaeus was a bad man?”
“He was a chief tax collector,” Dosa said.
“No,” Perahyah said. “On the page. Does Luke say he was a bad man?”
“It says,” Dosa spoke with a smirk, “‘when he defrauds anyone.’”
“Look again,” Gadi said, “It is written, ‘if he defrauds anyone.’”
Dosa made a “hmm” sound.
“It doesn’t say Shorty confessed his sin,” Perahyah said, “although everyone thought he was a sinner. Doesn’t say Jesus forgave him. Didn’t have to. Jesus didn’t tell him to repent and didn’t tell him to quit his business.”
Dosa sputtered but found no way to respond. Gadi said, “Looks like Jesus restored a person unofficially but wrongfully charged. Let’s not make Zacchaeus super bad or super good. We’ll just praise Jesus for the way he brings new life to each of us. Leave it at that?” Everyone nodded, including Dosa, although he did so grudgingly.
Gadi encouraged Perahyah and Dosa to shake hands. Then he left them in the corner and approached a widow sitting across the way. As he walked to her, calculating how much of the group’s meager common purse he could grant her, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, thank you that we now have your life and teachings written. May your example and your words lead us in all we do, especially when we disagree with others.”
Preaching Point: No matter others’ bad opinions, Jesus loves and accepts every person.
* * *
Life-Saving Advice
by David O. Bales
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
“Mr. Boostrom treated Jedidiah as badly as he treated the two of us,” Sharon said.
“Right down to calling him ‘Jed,’” Harvey said, “which Mr. Boostrom knew Jedidiah didn’t like; but that was Mr. Boostrom. And Mr. Boostrom’s still infesting my mind. I mean, Jedidiah was protecting us as much as he could, and Mr. and Mrs. Boostrom were exploiting us; yet, they so thoroughly dominated us that I still can only refer to him as ‘Mr. Boostrom,’ not just ‘Boostrom’ or ‘Gaylen,’ certainly not ‘father.’”
It was May 1, 1942 and Sharon and Harvey, sister and brother, were on the rise above the farm where they’d been taken in by the Boostroms when their mother died in childbirth and their father abandoned them. They’d been snatched by the Boostroms because in 1932 farmers were going bankrupt in the Oklahoma dust bowl and the great depression. Sharon at 11 and Harvey at 12 had been prime workers: strong enough to toil but not old enough to resist unnatural demands for their drudgery. No matter what the Boostroms promised the sheriff who granted them custody, they never showed the children affection. Mules, pigs, cow and chickens needed to be fed. Cow milked, fields cultivated, meals cooked, house cleaned, clothes washed, crops harvested, produce canned, roof repaired. For the three years they labored there, another task always awaited them.
Harvey lowered his voice, “And we’re still deploying Jedidiah in our defense.” He looked squarely at Sharon, “Have you ever told anybody about this hell hole?”
“A little, but who’d believe it?” Sharon said. “That’s why I insisted we come here again. We survived because of Jedidiah and his name. How he loved his name. ‘From the Bible,’ he said: ‘the Lord’s Beloved.’ He cherished his name like a family heirloom, and told us that to God we were beloved too. Nobody else told us that. Always something to do and they pointed, ‘More over here.’”
Nine years after the two had finally escaped from the farm they stood now and gazed down at what had become near “ghost” quality. The house was burned to the foundation, the blackened chimney standing as a futile sentinel and the other buildings tumbling in. “There’s where the well was,” Sharon said. The Boostroms’ poorly growing garden had needed to be tended by carrying water from the well because the stream they’d relied on for irrigation had gone dry the year before and wasn’t refreshed the following spring. “About the only times Mrs. Boomstrom came to the garden was when I was weeding, irrigating, or picking. She’d point down, ‘More over here,’ as neutral as if she were a government inspector.”
“If it hadn’t been for Jedidiah,” Harvey said. He looked slowly right and left, taking in what had been the border of their world for three years. “He stepped between Mr. Boostrom and me more than once. I remember like yesterday that last time when I was plowing, and Mr. Boostrom followed me with his belt and whapped my butt anytime I let the mule go crooked. I was so excited to see Jedidiah’s long skinny legs as he ran wildly across the field to us — his hat flew off as he hopped across the turned ground and furrows — that I let the mule swing left farther than ever and Mr. Boostrom hit me twice more before Jedidiah got to us. I could tell he was planning to grab Mr. Boostrom’s arm, but chose instead to dive between us, with Mr. Boostrom seeing that if he hit me again, he could be killed.”
“‘Jed,’ he screamed, ‘get out of here. Nothing to do with you.’ Jedidiah stood there with a threatening look on his face and said, ‘You’re treating the boy worse than the mule.’”
“I wasn’t about to stay around, just clucked the mule and went on plowing, pretty grateful to Jedidiah.”
“I was over there by the pump,” Sharon said, “when I saw Mr. Boostrom, steadying his wife almost in front of him, right there by the chicken coop. He told Jedidiah he was letting him go. Just said he didn’t need him. True. By that time the two of us were as good as one strong hand. And if it’d been up to the Boostroms, we wouldn’t have had a chance even to talk with Jedidiah before they chased him away. But Jedidiah wasn’t going to leave until you came in from the field and nothing Mr. Boostrom said budged him from where he sat beside the barn with his scuffed brown grip, hat on, and coat over his arm.”
The brother and sister stood surveying the old farm. It was the anniversary of the day Jedidiah was fired. For two years in their youth he’d been their only touch with human kindness. They’d promised themselves they’d never forget that day and they knew today would be the last time they’d visit the scene of their servitude. Harvey was in the army and about to be shipped out to the war in the Pacific and Sharon was engaged to be married.
Harvey stared off toward the north field. “We knew we couldn’t get away from the Boostroms and Jedidiah had no right by family or law to appoint himself protector. He didn’t need fancy learning to tell us the two things we needed to cling to if we were going to survive. He just did it, like this was his divine mission. First, ‘remember you are God’s beloved children.’”
Sharon said, “It was a statement of who we really were no matter the circumstances, and they were pretty bad circumstances.”
“‘Then, let God make you worthy of his call,’” Harvey said. “‘Basically, this is what God gives you and this is what you do with it.’ Can’t imagine anybody saying anything that could’ve meant more. Kept us alive and hoping for another year until we escaped.”
They descended the hill and wandered the farm for a while longer, kicking their feet in the dust. Neither knew what awaited them with the United States at war across both oceans. They hugged and walked silently back to their car, ready to proceed their different ways along with the strong memory of a man’s love and advice that had guided them thus far and which they could only hope would serve them into the future.
Preaching point: Encouragement to be worthy of God’s love.
*****************************************
StoryShare, November 3, 2019 issue.
Copyright 2019 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.
