Finding Christmas

Cody and Kayla (aka Mary and Joseph)

"Marcy, it's Melody.  I've got a couple here with a dog in my car.  They got a flat and couldn't find a tire.  They have nowhere to go.  I don't know what to do."  I looked over at my husband.  He'd been working most of the day on his message for Sunday and had just settled onto the couch to watch some television before turning in for the night.  "Let me talk to Larry," I told her.  "I'll call you right back."  He looked at me warily, already sensing that his relaxing evening was about to be hijacked.   I repeated what she had told me and then handed him my phone. "You need to call her and talk to her," I said.   "They can't stay in their car. We've got to figure something out."   For being so early in December,  it had been uncommonly bitter cold that day.   He reluctantly made the call.

Newly married and recently discharged from the army, Cody with his new bride Kayla had traveled from Kentucky to New Jersey and then on to New England, believing that family would welcome them as they put down roots and settled back into civilian life.  But it didn't take long to realize that neither family was anxious to embrace and bring them in for the long term.  An invite from another family member in Arizona was their only other option.

That's where they were heading when the tire blew passing through Big Flats, the shopping mecca that everybody from three counties shops at around here.  Cody made a call and had his vehicle towed to the Super Walmart, not far from where the blowout occurred. Surely they of all places would have a replacement.  But they didn't.  For the next several hours, in between calling every tire place he could find listed,  he spoke to person after person as they emerged from the store, asking if they knew where he and his wife might find a place to stay the night. But no one offered them any help.   They were desperate, low on cash and a hotel was simply too expensive.  He would later say that he had approached no fewer than 30 people on that frigid Friday afternoon. When he could, he'd crawl into the back seat and share the one blanket with his bride and her dog Tobi, occasionally starting up the engine just enough to ward off some of the cold. Evening was approaching, the sun had set and the temperature was dropping even more.

And then he saw Melody.  He approached her, and when asked if she might know of somewhere that he and his wife and their dog might stay, this one didn't brush him off.  She peered into the back seat of his car and saw a girl with her hands raised,  crying out as if in prayer, pleading for help.  And she knew that this was no accident.  This was a divine appointment.

Cody and Kayla would be with us for the next three days.  We knew as soon as they walked through our door that they were to stay with us.  After dozens of calls, Melody eventually tracked down a place that could order that specific tire. But it wouldn't be in until Monday. So we gave them the spare bedroom and Melody took the dog to her house.

From the moment we met,  I knew God had a special plan in mind, and He was using us, starting with Melody, to work it out.  From the warm coats supplied through the church's clothes closet, the hundred-dollar gift card won at a special event the next afternoon and the cash pressed into their hands on Sunday morning from members of the church, they knew that they had not been forgotten.  That same morning, they read aloud for the second week of Advent, then lit the wreath and the appropriate candles.  Hope came first. Love followed. Cody was dressed in a three-piece suit that morning with a matching tie.  It was on a rack in the clothes closet.  There just for him. 

We saw them off on Monday afternoon.  The new tire was on and the gas tank filled, both early Christmas presents I guess you could say.  Tobi the dog had been reunited with his people, and all seemed right once again.  I don't think either of us could have spoken as the car turned the corner, away from us.  We had them for just three days, but we had loved them from the very first moment they walked through our door.       
Larry still calls them his Mary and Joseph, in part because they were far from home and had no place to stay.  But it was more than that.  We needed to be reminded that in the midst of our preoccupation with all the preparations and busyness of the season, we were missing it.  And they brought it back to us.  They brought us Christmas.  They needed us.  But more than anything, we needed them.       

Kayla reunited with Tobi

The Visitor

It was August 4, 2014.  It had been confirmed a week earlier that what Fawn had suspected was true, she was pregnant.  She was on vacation at the beach in Panama City, loving every moment, exhilarated at the news, having a blast.  She even had a t-shirt airbrushed with the words Big Brother for two-year-old Valor.

And yet something didn't feel quite right. She felt especially hot during that week and wore out easily, but that was certainly to be expected in August on a beach in Florida in the first trimester of a pregnancy. But that night she knew.  She was going to lose this baby. Her heart broken, she would later write these words: "How could I already love someone this much?  A little ball of cells?  And it hit me...this little one already had a soul."

A baby one month in her womb and she already felt a deep connection to this living being that had been held so closely to her heart over the past week.  And so she grieved, crying out to God as she lay there on her bed, pleading with Him to let her know that He cared.  "Jesus," she prayed, "You can come take this sweet baby if it needs to go home with you, but one thing I'm asking you is to let me feel your presence.  I need to hear you, feel you, see you...something. "

Sometime during the very early morning hours as she drifted in and out of sleep she felt something sit down beside her, the bed caving in slightly.  Still in and out of sleep, as if in a dream, she felt something lay over her. Warmth went through her, then arms wrapped themselves around her neck, hugging her for what seemed like several seconds. Then slowly rising, it brushed over her stomach and was gone.

"I started dreaming that mom was here with me" she writes, "And I called to her and asked, 'Mom, were you just in my room?'  And I told her what had happened and I said, "Do you think I should be afraid?" And she said, 'No Fawn, that was Jesus.  He came to visit you.'"  When she opened her eyes that morning, she knew that her baby was gone.

Still overwhelmed by the encounter, in tears she concluded with this: "I want another baby and I believe God will bring one in His time.  I will trust and wait.  Until then, I will heal and be grateful forever that my Jesus answered my prayer and came to me.  He feels like warmth, peace and perfect, pure love.  His embrace can't be described.  Had this not happened, I wouldn't have had this personal encounter with my Jesus.  So while hurting, I am also in complete awe....I know because I can still feel it, that it was as real as can be.  My Jesus loves me, and you and all of us.  No matter what we are going through, he loves us and is always there."

A year later Fawn would hold a baby girl in her arms.  She would call her Violet, a name she had loved and picked out for her daughter many years earlier.  A perfect fit to her name, she is full of color and life and is a reminder that God makes all things right and beautiful in his time. In the meantime, there is another child that Fawn has not forgotten.  Though she never got to hold that one in her arms, she believes that Jesus did, the night He carried her little one home. 

Violet-- full of life and in purple 

The Woodfin Family

Going Home (A Memorial Day Tribute)

Twenty years ago I flew from Alabama to New York to spend a week with my father.  I had made the trip with a specific objective, to find out more about his years in the 82nd Airborne during World War II, specifically the 325th Glider Regiment.  The time was rich, sitting at the kitchen table, recording his voice, reading old letters and looking at pictures mounted on the worn, black pages of an old photo album.  He pointed at an empty space on one of the pages, the corner mounts still intact. He told me the name of the soldier whose picture had occupied that spot at one time and continued, "He was captured in the Bulge on Christmas Eve and died in a prisoner-of-war camp.  His parents contacted the captain while we were in Berlin and I gave him this one." I wondered how many others were there that he knew that never made it home. 
      
There sits on our of our bookshelves a long, framed picture of a few hundred soldiers taken on October 31, 1942 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  It was taken a month or so after my father had arrived to begin his training. Less than a year later they would be in Europe, combat-ready.  Normandy came first.  One day I asked him to point out to me where he was in that photo, so hard to pick out in that sea of men, all in uniform.  As he pointed to a much younger version of himself, he said,  "Many of them didn't come home." He was quiet after that.   

This picture was taken at Fort Bragg on October 31, 1942    

                                                 
Recently someone asked me if I knew where my father was in that photo.  It had been such a long time since I had looked that I had to admit I no longer remembered where he stood. But this week as Memorial Day approached, I thought of him and determined that I would search the photo and find him again.  Two days ago I ran my finger over each face, row by row, looking into the eyes of every man,  peering out from that place and time 75 years ago. I wondered if they had any thought that day of what was ahead for them, about the possibility of not getting home after the war was over.  As for my father, I found him towards the last, I mostly recognized him by his eyes.  I  was grateful that he'd made it home.  

My father standing in the third row, second from the right 

In one of his last letters, written just a couple of months before returning to the States, he penned the following: "I will get home.  Some never will.  But they're not forgotten, at least by the boys that were there with them."  We can't, we mustn't forget them either.  I owe it to my dad.  We owe it to them.  Every last one.   

  

Ron's Legacy (A Tribute)

I recently attended the memorial service of an extraordinary man.  His name would be unfamiliar to most, he certainly wasn't famous by the world's standards.  But for over two hours I sat in a packed sanctuary filled with a few hundred people and listened to the personal stories of some of those he had impacted over the span of his life. The officiating pastor didn't preach, but I heard the most eloquent sermon spoken that day through the example of a life well lived.  It left me challenged, changed.   

Ron, the subject of this piece, lived out the greatest of the commandments.  The priority of his life  was to love the Lord his God completely with all his heart, all his soul, all his mind and all his strength.  The second greatest commandment, to love his neighbor as much as he loved himself, was for him a natural response that came out of the first.  He couldn't help himself.   

When one loves, one serves,  and over the years that's exactly what he did.  He became the coach of the church's Bible Quiz Team, even taking the young people on more than one occasion to Nationals.  Ben, one of his former quizzers, shared about the influence Ron had on him and so many others, spending hours studying God's Word with them while getting ready to compete.  I suspect, however, that beating out the opponents was not the primary reason he took on the role of coach. He was investing in something much greater,  young people building strong foundations on God's Word.  Ben's family sat across the aisle from me, his wife holding a baby with three or four other children sitting on either side of her.  The investment made into the life of Ben and others like him wasn't over when Ron's heart stopped beating.  It will continue on with the generations to come.  

What man in his retirement years wants to hang with twenty somethings on a Friday night?  Turns out that Ron did.  He and his wife were regular attendees at The Happenin',  a ministry for the young adult community in the area. From what I heard, his presence had quite an effect on that age group as well.  But it didn't stop there.  When asked if anyone else had something they'd like to say, a little girl took the microphone and talked about how special he was to her too.  It didn't seem to matter who they were, Ron found ways to connect with every one of them.               

Glenn was one of the last to speak.  He deals in cattle and shared a conversation from 25 years ago.  Ron gave him a call and told him that he was going to sell his cows.  He had left teaching several years earlier, moved to Pennsylvania with his family,  renovated an old farm house, purchased some land, built a barn and took up dairy farming.  But as much as he had enjoyed this season of his life, the thought of investing in something even greater pulled at him.  When explaining his decision to let the cows go, he told Glenn that there was already more than enough milk being produced. "I want to do something that's needed," he said.

Zambia might seem a far cry from rural Pennsylvania. And yet maybe not so much.  It obviously fit him well, for he and his family would serve the people there for the next 10 years.  With his farming experience he worked in mobilizing the people to better their lives by drawing upon the resources they already had on hand.  Working right along side the villagers, using the most basic of tools and materials,  he taught them among other things how to build dams and dig wells, giving them and the generations to come a better quality of life.

This man's life reminds me a bit of what the Apostle Paul wrote in one of his letters.  He had become a servant to all, entering their different worlds so that they might come to know Jesus. Ron was many things: a teacher, a farmer, a planter, a builder, a mentor and a friend to so many.  But mostly he was a servant, the motivation of his life never changing, always driven by the love placed in his heart by the Father.  His son-in-law, a Zambian, gave tribute to his father-in-law with the words of a fellow African.   "When I am with Ron," he said, "I forget that he is white."

There were no signs, no warnings Ron Herr was about to pass from this life to the next on the day his heart stopped beating.  Upon hearing the news everyone was stunned, there'd been no indication of anything. In fact, I think it was his daughter Tandi who said her dad was probably as surprised as everyone else. But I know as his spirit broke free he had no regrets.  He was ready, having invested heavily in what he couldn't see but believed to be true with his whole heart.  And he did that through the gift that he gave of so freely while he was here.  It was love, pure and simple.