Monday, April 15, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Angels watchin’ over me, my Lord
Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.
When they lived in southern California, our friends remodeled a big house to their own specifications, and then God called them to be missionaries in Kenya. They put all their important stuff in a locked shed and friends moved into the house, with a contract for deed. The real estate market dropped and their friends offered to buy the house for a lower price. Our friends signed the deal.
However their friends included a clause which made everything in the shed their own property, without mentioning the change. Later (a few years later) they apologized. But all the stuff was gone. Their childhood mementos, tools, furniture could not be retrieved.
What can we do to accomplish the works of God? Jesus said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.”
God had another house for them, a house on a hill overlooking the Rose Bowl. The elderly widow had so far refused to sell the house her husband built, but now when our friends made a very low offer, she accepted it happily. That was how things went so often for our friends along the path of gratitude and generosity fed by their faith and their Father, running (although sometimes through hairpin curves) across their lives.
Meanwhile, during their off-and-on seventeen years in Kenya, the same ups and downs kept happening. Black keys, white keys, flats and sharps, all made one heavenly melody, although it was not often predictable, and certainly not Western. Missionary administrators were sometimes corrupt, but when our friends tracked down the corrupters, no one much appreciated it. They didn’t really want to know. Bandits, often teenagers, stopped them sometimes and held them up with AK 47s in their hands. Their less-than-reliable-mission-supplied Land Cruiser lost a wheel, got stuck in deep mud, and was nearly washed away in a flash flood.
Their family grew from four to five while they were in Kenya. College interns often came to work with them during the summer. Once when a wheel broke off their car, which stopped just before it tumbled into a deep ravine, a mechanic appeared out of nowhere who called his shop in Nairobi and then put the parts together to repair the car. Call him an angel.
They encountered many angels, which of course mostly worked behind the scenes, invisible. But when they appeared, our friends’ gratitude knew no bounds. For as they often point out, they felt God’s presence much more in Africa, where the security of first world protections and privileges were scant to non-existent. They were in the third world now, in a province of Kenya noted for its violence. Many friends warned them not to go into that part of the country. But how could they not? They lived and worked right there, two days north of Nairobi, in a house they raised money in America to buy.
I have chosen the way of truth, I have set my heart on your laws.
I hold fast to your statutes, O my Lord, do not let me put to shame.
I run in the path of your commands, yes I run in the path of your commands.
For you have set my heart free.
So now, back in the US since 2016, another real estate miracle allows them to be farmers in Texas. They live in a fixed-up house on 100 acres with a bull, twenty beef cattle, horses, chickens, dogs, and cats for their creature comforts. Their three children are grown, and they visit each other often. They lead a Sunday School class and a small group. They are in love with God and each other.
And all five of them have stories – stories of close calls and miraculous saves. God is not far from any of us, but in Africa they learned to pray for God’s help, since AAA wasn’t available, since doctors weren’t at their beck and call, since their resources were slim, since streetlights were mostly non-existent, and lions prowled the jungle, never far away.
Can you believe all of this? It’s true, and it’s wonderful. I imagine if this family were on trial in front of some contemporary Sanhedrin, we could say about them what Luke said about Stephen:
All those who sat looked intently at them and saw that their faces were like the face of an angel.
(Acts 6, Psalm 119:23-30, Matthew 4, John 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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