Sweet Surprise

There are many, many reasons I do what I do. There are many reasons I stick around. And I will surely write about them, one here, one there. Those things are necessary to keep going on. 

Today, at least, the very best thing about this job is the surprise. There is transformation where I expected death. There is openness where I expected fear. There is grace from the people I never would have guessed would offer it. There is love before and above anything else. And it has been one of those weeks of sweet, sweet surprise.

A bit of that surprise was the Youth Group Sunday school class, all almost 8th graders and under, who managed to bring up and wrestle with questions of human value--what does make someone matter, any way? Somehow, we even ended up with the exasperated proclamation from a not quite 6th grader, "Why can't we all just share everything so we all have what we need?"

More of that surprise was from the looks of interest and possibility on the faces of just a few when I brought up the possibility of using part of our unused lot for farming--as in a co-op that would give some work and some food to people in need in our community.

Most of all, though, the surprise came from a woman who is somewhere around 70. She's wonderful in a lot of ways and someone I'm quite happy to have around in general. But I never expected that her eyes would light up when she began talking about history, specifically Middle Eastern history. Her favorite Bible study ever was one where she had a teacher who could take a biblical story and put it on a modern map and even cover a lot of in-between history.

I cautiously offered her a favorite book of mine, Elias Chacour's We Belong to the Land. There's nothing particularly racy about it, other than the fact that it's about a Palestinian man's ministry and life in Israel. There's no way offering that could ever get me in trouble or ruffle a few feathers.

She loved it. She called me the next day to say how much she loved it. We talked more about it the following day. She marvels at the intricate complications surrounding that land. She asked me what Druze were exactly. I had to look it up, again.

I emailed her the answer later. And her response was yet another surprise: "Many thanks. I hope we are fortunate enough to meet some day. Should be fun."

Thanks be to God for sweet, sweet surprise.