Wednesday,
June 30, 2021
Pray like this: Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. May your Kingdom come soon. May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Matthew 6:9-10
I met Ricky in the parking lot of the Veteran’s
Administration Hospital this Monday. He
struck up a conversation with our dog, Wellie.
(Elizabeth just happened to be accompanying Wellie on his walk while
Russell was getting checked out by various medical people on the 3rd
floor.)
As I walked up to Elizabeth, Wellie, and Ricky’s
conversation, I was greeted with a big smile (by Ricky…Wellie hardly ever
smiles). Ricky extended a handshake and
introduced himself. We exchanged a few
words of greeting and Ricky began sharing the mission he’d been on ever since God
got his attention. I never heard the exact
details of what grabbed this man’s focus and turned it to God, but when you’re
in a Veteran’s Administration parking lot, and the guy says he’s on a “mission”
you don’t question too deeply.
It turned out Ricky’s mission was to help bring
Heaven down to earth. And it had to do
with the Lord’s Prayer. What had grabbed
my new friend was the fact that, when Jesus taught this way of praying to his
disciples, it was the first time it had ever been heard. He was alluding to the reality that we hear
it often in church, have it on bookmarks and bumper stickers, but it’s meant to
be a framework for our daily life’s walk, not a mantra to be tacked onto the
preacher’s Sunday prayer.
I can’t recall exactly how Ricky explained the
mission, but it went something like: Lord, let me be part of bringing
Your Heaven down to where it’s needed, here on earth. Let that Heaven begin to interfere with all
the killing, stealing and all the other unkindness we do to each other. Heaven, here on earth, Lord!
Then Ricky made it personal. He shared how trustworthy this faithful God
is when it comes to working-out our part in this mission. Ricky’s a truck-owner/driver by trade. It seems a year or so ago, when this mission
was just beginning to dawn on him, he had a mishap with his truck. He ran into a big fence gate while making a
delivery. It was late in the day and
there was no one around, so he just left.
The next day it was like a festering thorn under his skin that he’d left
without somehow settling this with the fence’s owner. So Ricky went back and found the owner
looking at that mangled fence. The man
said, Just look at that…some fool just beat my fence all to pieces. Ricky told me at that point he had tears
starting to come down, and he just blurted out, Mister, I’m that one; I
ran into your fence. He promised
he would pay for the damages, and gave the owner his contact information for
when he got the bill.
Later, after not hearing from the man, Ricky
called him and asked if he’d found out how much it was going to cost; Ricky was
ready to scrape together whatever was needed.
The man said, Son, you don’t gotta pay me nothin’. I got that fence back to where it will open
and close, and there’s no need to worry.
You don’t owe me; I’m just so thankful for the way you were honest about
it.
That’s when the mission
snapped into focus for Ricky; he could have gotten away with the thing, avoided
the humiliation of facing someone he’d wronged.
But, he knew God wasn’t that way.
God had loved Ricky enough to die for him, so being honest about the
fence was such a little thing. As it
turned out, it made the fence owner’s day, and helped Ricky see what a great
God he was serving. There was just a
little bit of Heaven come down to earth that day for a business owner and a
truck driver named Ricky.
For You Today
You
chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!
[1] Title Image: Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
