Monday, September 1, 2025
Labor Day in the USA
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Flying
The Lord himself, with a word of command,
with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God,
will come down from heaven,
and the dead in Christ will rise first.
In Illinois this summer we spent a Sunday in Waynesville, where we helped build a church in 1988, thirty-seven years ago. We’d moved from Lincoln two years earlier, and our welcome committee was Earl and Marlene Fields, two of the most hospitable people we’ve ever known. When our church had a harvest of talents to raise money for kid programs, they “sold” dinner parties which they cooked for and hosted in their home. Those parties sold out quickly.
When we left for campus ministry at the University of Illinois, Earl gave me a wooden plaque he created with his watercolors and woodburning kit. Because I flew hot air balloons, he painted a balloon on the plaque and below it burnt the words, “1 Thessalonians 4:17”:
Then we who are alive, who are left,
will be caught up together with them in the clouds
to meet the Lord in the air.
Marlene and Earl’s hospitality surrounded us from the moment we walked into the doors of that small town church housed in the former grade school building built decades before. That same hospitality welcomed two dozen professional carpenters and contractors who traveled from Atlanta, Georgia to build our new church with us, which began with the old meeting house made it into a family center, added another floor and a whole new sanctuary, and a steeple that still stands taller than anything else in that small town.
One of the contractors, Bill Fineran, brought his family up from Atlanta to Waynesville to live. Four of us drove down to Atlanta to help them make the move. Once he was settled, Bill used two different colors of wood, maple and mahogany, to create large chessboards for each of us. Bill and Hazel found themselves welcomed as were Margaret and I, and they made their home in Waynesville permanently.
Earl and his sister contracted polio when they were kids, and both of them walked around Waynesville with a limp all the rest of their lives. Earl also got hit with Parkinson’s, and it became more and more difficult for him to manage the shaking of his hands. But he made me a beautiful plaque which I will always cherish with those shaky fingers.
During our harvest of talents, Bill and Hazel brought their kids over to Earl and Marlene’s house for one of those dinner parties, fried chicken and all. Everybody wins.
Thus we shall always be with the Lord.
Therefore, console one another with these words.
 (1 Thessalonians 4, Psalm 96, Luke 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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