THE GIVER BEHIND THE GIFT

“…The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”  Genesis 1:7

“Through Him all things were made…In Him was life, and that life was the light of men.”  John 1:3-4

On one visit a couple of weeks into her stay, Johnnie May told me that she had heard a scripture she liked at the church service she had attended the night before.  She was pretty sure it was Psalm 57.  It didn’t ring any bells for me, so I went home and checked it out.  Yes, immediately I knew that was the one.  The first few verses were custom-written for her at this time.  Since she is not a reader, I decided to memorize it a little at a time and teach it to her so that she could find strength from it every day.

Now, here I need to make a confession:  I was pretty busy at these days, and my mind had lost some of its quickness concerning memorization from disuse, so had the circumstances been different, I am pretty sure I would have just written it down and taken it with me to teach her to memorize! After all, she was the one who said she liked it, and she wasn’t able to read, so memorization was her need right then, not really mine. However, this was a jail visit, so I was not allowed to bring anything in with me except my drivers’ license to identify myself as being on her list of visitors. Thus, I was forced to memorize it in order to “smuggle” it in to her. A veiled blessing for sure!

(It reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 when at the end, a whole colony of rebellious people finds a way to save the precious words their government is determined to burn: they simply divide up the Bible and memorize vast sections.  A person, thereby, became The Gospel of John, or The Letter to the Romans.  When you wanted to read that section, you went to the corresponding person who had totally digested those words.) But of course, I wasn’t digesting or becoming the whole book of Psalms.  I just needed to transport into the jailhouse a few verses for my friend.

A couple more visits, and we were working on quoting the first verse together:  “Have mercy on me, O God!  Have mercy on me.  For in you my soul takes refuge.  I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed.”

 And of course, you know what comes next in my story, don’t you?  Of course you do: the verse became my own.  Lo, it was not just an idea I had to minister to somebody else! The baby bird who hid under the ample feathers of the Big-Winged Mama was no longer just my friend in jail with the huge disaster.  There I found myself, taking shelter, closing my eyes to block out the terrifying world, and quoting those few words during one disaster after another.  And sure enough, each one came to pass and not to stay.

I learned again the thing I thought I had already learned a hundred times before: when we set out to help somebody else, the help’s fallout rains down onto us.  This is, of course, because
the idea was never truly our own.  It is the thing that happens when the putty of the human mind surrenders into the Hands of the Potter, the Higher Giver, who sparks divine light and life into the raw material of mankind.