“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.
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This story happened in the United States. It was sent to me by a friend through e-mail:
It was a beautiful day and Ruth went to her mailbox. She found only one letter. She picked it up and looked at it before opening, but then she looked at the envelope again. There was no stamp, no postmark, only her name and address. She read the letter.
“Dear Ruth,” the letter said. “I’m going to be in your neighborhood Saturday afternoon and I’d like to stop by for a visit.” It ended with these words: “Love always.” The sender: “Jesus.”
Her hands were shaking as she placed the letter on the table. “Why would the Lord want to visit me? I’m nobody special. I don’t have anything to offer.”
With that thought, Ruth remembered her empty kitchen cabinets. “Oh, my goodness, I really don’t have anything to offer. I’ll have to run down to the store and buy something for dinner.”
She reached for her purse and counted out its contents: five dollars and forty cents. “Well, I can get some bread and cold cuts, at least,” she thought.
Ruth threw on her coat and hurried out the door. At the mart, she was able to buy a loaf of French bread, a half-pound of sliced turkey, and a carton of milk – that left her with a grand total of twelve cents to last her until Monday. Nonetheless, she felt good as she headed home, her meager offerings tucked under her arm.
All of a sudden, she heard someone calling, “Hey lady, can you help us?” Ruth had been so absorbed in her dinner plans that she hadn’t even noticed two figures huddled in the alleyway. A man and a woman, both of them dressed in little more than rags.
“Look lady, I don’t have a job, you know, and my wife and I have been living out here on the street, and, well, now it’s getting cold and we’re getting hungry. If you could help us, lady, we’d really appreciate it.”
Ruth looked at them both. They were dirty, they smelled bad and frankly, she was certain that they could get some kind of work if they really wanted to.
“Sir, I’d like to help you, but I’m a poor woman myself. All I have is a few cold cuts and some bread, and I’m having an important guest for dinner tonight and I was planning on serving that to Him.”
”Yeah, well, okay lady, I understand. Thanks anyway.” The man put his arm around the woman’s shoulders, turned and headed back into the alley. As she watched them leave, Ruth felt a familiar twinge in her heart.
“Hey, wait!” The couple stopped and turned as she ran down the alley after them. “Look, why don’t you take this food? I’ll figure out something else to serve my guest.”
She handed the man her grocery bag. “Thank you, lady. Thank you very much!” The man’s wife added, “Yes, thank you!”
It was at that moment that Ruth could see how the wife was shivering. “You know, I’ve got another coat at home. Here, why don’t you take this one?”
Ruth unbuttoned her jacket and slipped it over the woman’s shoulders. Then smiling, she turned and walked back to the street — without her coat and with nothing to serve her guest.
Ruth was chilled by the time she reached her front door, and worried too. The Lord was coming to visit and she didn’t have anything to offer Him. She fumbled through her purse for the door key. But as she did, she noticed another envelope in her mailbox.
“That’s odd,” she said. “The mailman doesn’t usually come twice in one day.”
Anyway, she opened the letter and read: “It was so good to see you again. Thank you for the lovely meal. And thank you, too, for the beautiful coat.” It was signed: “Jesus.”
“The radiant Christian,” William A. Ward once pointed out, “is more concerned with carrying his cross than with complaining about his callouses. He remembers the harvests, not the hardships. He thinks about his friends, not his failures. He talks more about his blessings than his backaches, more about his opportunities than his operations.”
Someone describes a Christian in these words: “A Christian is a mind through which Christ thinks, a heart through which Christ loves, a voice through which Christ speaks, a hand through which Christ helps.”
As a Christian, Watchman Nee penned: “Outside of Christ, I am only a sinner, but in Christ, I am saved. Outside of Christ, I am empty; in Christ, I am full. Outside of Christ, I am weak; in Christ, I am strong. Outside of Christ, I cannot; in Christ, I am more than able. Outside of Christ, I have been defeated; in Christ, I am already victorious. How meaningful are the words, ‘in Christ.’”—###
