Monday, April 24, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
La pointe vierge in Siloam Springs
When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into boats and came to Capernaum looking for Jesus.
I enjoy being a detective. Saturday night I watched most of All the President’s Men, about Nixon’s coverup of the Watergate break-in before his election in 1972. It was all detective work by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Sunday morning I drove to Siloam Springs to visit the world where my friend Elizabeth Flora-Swick spent four years, graduating from John Brown University, spending her Sundays at a small church then called The Pointe, where she experienced the best care and attitude anywhere toward physically disabled folks. Elizabeth spends her days in a wheelchair.
I used memories of my long conversation with Elizabeth outside Einstein’s in Urbana on Thursday morning, my Kindle copy of her book Undefiled Access, along with Google maps and some sharing time with two guys in the church (Tommy and Kirk) who were there when Elizabeth was attending. They remembered her. I showed them the cover of her book and read them the section where she praised the way the church cared for her. They changed her oil in the parking lot at least once. They made space for her wheelchair up front every time she came.
And their attitude toward her was generous and loving. Rather than needing any kind of “success” in the curing of her body, they understood how Elizabeth was already healed in her life greatly loved by Jesus, how the Holy Spirit’s conversations with her assumed the healing. The “curing” of her body was something else, something entirely different. Impatience about when and whether that curing would come were never a part of of her life with that church and with God. “The kindness of this congregation left a permanent mark on my life,” she wrote (p. 254).
They said to him, “What can we do to accomplish the works of  God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.”
It took a little digging for me to find the church, because a year ago the name was changed from The Pointe to Ascend. It’s housed in a converted movie theater near downtown Siloam Springs. Cars were stacked up in every possible parking place for a block or two around the church.
Part of that crowd might have been people coming to the Sunday morning wedding yesterday. I got excited when I heard about that. I thought of Margaret’s and my wedding on Sunday, August 19, 1979 at Mt. Pulaski Christian Church. Margaret began talking in our Sunday School class how “worldly” marriages had become, how they had become separate from our experience of worship. In that class we decided to respond to our pastor’s invitation at the end of a worship service by coming up together and asking to be married.
Of course it was planned, but still … not everyone at the service knew it was happening, and I think we accomplished our goal of uniting our desire to be married with our desire to worship God. Rather than two services at the same church, we had one. And then a potluck afterward in the basement, just like we had at church quite often, for other less personal reasons.
I got home to Austin a few hours later than I expected, but the trip to Siloam Springs was wonderful. Margaret has a bad cold, lots of coughing, stuck mostly at home, so she asked for, and I brought her, some milk and some chopped brisket. She ate and drank, came out negative on a home covid test, and we decided to see her doctor tomorrow if we can.
We hope she gets better soon. Our friends George and Anne are getting married Saturday morning. Early. Like 7 am. The night before for their rehearsal dinner, they are having a potluck.
And I’m making potato salad.
Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him the Father, God, has set his seal.
(Acts 6, Psalm 119, Matthew 4, John 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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