Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 24, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
A not-so-chance encounter
My thoughts are not your thoughts. Nor are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts.
Special treat yesterday. I went to the Apple Store near our apartment and picked up a new titanium blue iPhone. As in the past, this experience seemed like something from the Jetsons, but with real people. Apple tech Mo from Miami got me started, as we talked about the differences in the milk of Jersey cows and Holsteins. While we talked she touched all the right spots on my old phone and her new iPad. As we approached the “setup table” another Apple person brought out my new phone.
George took over from Mo and began to cross-polllinate the new phone with my old one. Everything worked. I wondered how we ever got along before electricity, and then before electronics, and then before the internet, and then before wi-fi, and then …
Other Apple folks aided and abetted the process, as I stood at the table for another 90 minutes or so. All the customers had their own problems, some greater than others. I had no problems, so I was free to watch the data transfer from my old phone to the cloud and back to my new phone. And I was free to talk to Scott, who was doing the same thing. There were others too, but mostly I talked with Scott, a guy from North Chicago about my age, wearing a Cubs hat like I was (except his was white, and a relic from the 2016 World Series winner). “Are you from Chicago?” he asked.
Scott, an extravert like me, talked about his dad. Not a great dad, but “he loved me.” Dad was a very bad husband, who finally retired and left his wife to go to Las Vegas with his brother. He wanted to escape the Chicago humidity and his rheumatoid arthritis. Scott asked him to do something in Vegas, maybe drive a taxi since he loved to talk and he loved to drive.
But he did not become a taxi driver. Instead he spent his retirement bundle on booze and gambling, and then not too long after, he died.
Scott didn’t weep. But he wasn’t bitter either. In between the difficulties that beset his parents (and his older sister) he enjoys his life. He married and they had children. But he did eventually have a three-week affair, which he confessed to his wife, who gave them six months to see if they could patch things up. No go. After the six months she asked him to leave and they got a divorce. Tough on the kids, maybe not so tough on the parents.
Seek the Lord while he may be found, call on him while he is near. Let the scoundrel forsake his way, and the wicked his thoughts; let him turn to the Lord for mercy, to our God, who is generous in forgiving.
Scott and Julie were Christians. He found a counselor named Sunday at Riverbend Church. As we talked he pointed up at the plate glass windows of the Apple store, at least two stories high. He remembered sitting beside a wall of windows like that outside the counselor’s office.
“There was this rush inside me, like God pouring through the glass,” he told me. “I heard words. ‘You no longer need to be ashamed.’ The words flew around inside me. I felt stunned. Nothing like this had happened before, or has happened since.” He teared up and cried in his big guy way for a few seconds.
I felt so happy for him and grabbed his shoulder, a little Apple store hug. “And the thing was,” he continued, “life just went on. Nothing changed. I met the counselor that day, and we got together for several weeks after. Julie and I got our divorce. My mom wept for me. But Mom made it through, like I did, and now she’s 96.”
I was quiet. He spoke up again. “What changed was that I believed God when he told me that.”
“It was God?” I asked.
“Who else could it be? And what is so great is that I believed Him. He was not ashamed of me. Maybe Dad would have been, my wife sure was, and I was ashamed of myself! But God was not. That was thirteen years ago. I will never forget that moment.”
So. Scott met his Source, and he was transformed. He had heard of him, but now … now! He had seen him. He has a girlfriend who grew up an American missionary kid in Hong Kong. Neither of them are in love with the churchiness of their evangelical surroundings, although they go often enough to a nearby megachurch. They like it there. It’s OK.
“I’m afraid to get married again. My girlfriend wants to get married, but I keep resisting.”
I told him he would not resist much longer. He cocked his head and looked at me. “Well, maybe,” I said. “What else are you going to do with your single solitary wonderful life?”
I wish I’d said that, actually. I wish I could remember even now just what Susan Oliver wrote in her marvelous poem. But I did cock my head, and look back at him, and smile.
As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return to it without watering the earth, so is my word that goes out from my mouth. It does not return to me empty.
“This meeting,” he said. “This kind of meeting doesn’t happen accidentally, not by chance. I can’t see how, and I sure don’t plan anything, but I know we are talking because God wants us to be talking.”
Well, of course I agreed. We both felt peaceful, and happily cushioned from the noisy crowd in the Apple store. He had to stay a little longer, working on his trade-in, and I wished him well. Back outside the sidewalks were crowded, another Saturday afternoon in the Domain. It was approaching 100 degrees (again!). I walked to the Red Garage, found my car, and drove on home.
You shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace. The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.
(Isaiah 55, Psalm 145, Philippians 1, Acts 16, Matthew 20)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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