Thursday, May 22, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Gratitude
I tell you these things so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete.
Sitting on the Call’s Kentucky front porch a few miles north of Murray, we felt right at home. Margaret met Bill and Brenda at Murray State University 56 years ago when they joined a few others and began a campus ministry, which has flourished ever since. Two years older than Margaret, Bill and Brenda represented Mom and Dad to her, as they have to many other students in the decades since.
On the way to Murray we shared breakfast with Judy Holt, another “Mom” for Margaret. Judy and Jack Holt pastored Grapevine Christian Church, just down the road from where Margaret grew up. Judy came into Margaret’s life at just the right time; they were drawn to each other’s intelligence and desire to pursue life’s questions quite a bit further than many of the folks around them.
Decades later, we celebrated life together with the Calls. We prayed and sang and told stories, ate warm meals around the kitchen table, played dominos into the evening, and rested in a warm bed on a stormy night. Because Bill is a volunteer fireman he is a “first responder,” and he heard calls three times that got him into his red truck … then cancellations got him out again. We cherished our time together.
We were in Evansville and then across the Ohio River in Kentucky to attend our nephew Matthew’s wedding and visit Margaret’s family and friends. I drove from Austin, and Margaret flew. Her friend Pam drove from her home in Cave-in-Rock to pick her up at the airport. They spent two nights together, shared photos of kiddos and beautiful scenes from Switzerland, ate good food and remembered their years together, first at Murray and then Lincoln Christian Seminary.
God, who knows the heart, bore witness by granting them the Holy Spirit just as he did us. He made no distinction between us and them, for by faith he purified their hearts.
All week long we said to each other, “What a great conversation!” No hurry. This is more than enough. Community begins as an idea, then the times, though short, we spent with each other brought the idea into fruit. It felt like the Holy Spirit because it was the work of the Holy Spirit, not something we did ourselves. Henri Nouwen wrote about his experiences with friends:
When we enjoy a good atmosphere in the family, a peaceful mood among friends, or a spirit of cooperation and mutual support in a community, we intuitively know that we did not produce it. It cannot be made, imitated, or exported. To people who are jealous, and who would like to have our joy and peace, we cannot give a formula to produce it or a method to acquire it. It is always perceived as a gift, to which the only appropriate response is gratitude.
Nearing the end of my trip up from Austin I stopped at Dawson Springs, a Kentucky spa town that was near and dear to Margaret’s mom Dorothy. In December just before Christmas 2021 a tornado killed 14 people there. I visited the city museum and spent an hour with retiree volunteer Bill Allen, who lived in Dawson all his life. Along with stories backed by thousands of photos (if I just had more time!), Bill’s gentle enthusiasm settled my mind. I felt invited into the small town world around me, just as Dorothy must have herself felt almost a hundred years ago.
It just seemed like wherever we went, we found warm people who not only shared their own stories but listened to ours. Back home now in Urbana, I keep marveling at being with so many fine people living at the edge of Indiana and Kentucky, and sharing our lives for just a moment.
(Acts 15, Psalm 96, John 10, John 15)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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