"Chance" Encounters

This has been a week for me mostly to listen, and maybe offer a brief word, but mostly listen. I took two brown paper grocery bags full of DVDs to a store that handles used CDs, DVDs and LPs. As the young man checked them for damage and sorted them by type, he talked about his experience following his mother’s death a couple of weeks earlier. He had no idea that I am a pastor. He simply talked about how deeply he was touched by the selfless service offered him and his brother by the people at his mother’s church. I was there for nearly an hour as he talked. Only when he asked if I was a teacher did I say that I am a pastor and then he asked for my card.

This week I also encountered a young man who has known a good deal of trauma in his life. He was once briefly a part of our congregation. We touched base enough for me to know that he will graduate from college next Spring.

There was the man who stopped at the church to pray in the Sanctuary, and then wanted to talk about the urgency he felt about the Coming of Christ, and his desire for various churches to unite in their outreach to save those who have strayed.

Three young men in very different places in their lives, but in all of these encounters I had the opportunity to listen to how God is at work. In these and a couple of other encounters, I felt the nudging of the Spirit to listen. This was not the time for me to do much talking. Now as I reflect on them, the Spirit of God is within me lifting them in prayer. And so I join with the Spirit offering them up into the best that God has for them. I pray that I could hear and see them with the ears and eyes of Christ.

Psalm 131

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.