I went to the park this afternoon with my stopwatch and my jogging goal for the day. But this time I also had another goal.
I’ve been going to the park a lot this past month and every time I go there is a little old lady walking around the track in her slippers. This is slightly unusual, but what is even more strange about it is that I never go to the park on the same days or even the same time of day. Morning, afternoon, or evening this lady always seems to be walking the track when I am. We smile and say a customary “Good-morning” (or whatever time of day it is,) but that has been the extent of it.
Sometimes when I jog at night I have trouble getting to sleep because I’m still wound up. This was the case a couple nights ago. As I lay awake, I couldn’t stop wondering about this cute little old lady in her flimsy brownish slippers that showed a hint of having been pink at some point in time. So I decided I ought to try and get to know her and find out her story. When I come to the point of crossing paths with her, I’m going to place a mental pause on the dictatorial watch’s flashing green countdown and slow down enough to try and talk. Wouldn’t you know it, for the first time in a month she wasn’t at the park when I went.
I feel like I’m being shown a lot of missed opportunities lately. When my brother and his wife were going through a rough week, my husband’s immediate response was that we should go to Colorado and help out for a bit. Sounded great, but then I started thinking that maybe they didn’t want to talk about it so I shouldn’t call just yet… and they actually have a bunch of family around so we might be more of a hindrance than a help...and so on. Turns out had we called right away they would have gladly welcomed the idea and we would have had an opportunity to really help family in a hard time. We have really nice neighbors right next door. When we moved in, we thought we should have them over for dinner sometime and really get to know them on a deeper level. It’s sad how “sometime” can turn into two years of never actually going through with that plan. What’s even worse is when out of the blue our neighbor tells us that his wife is moving out and we had no clue they were having problems. Before I even got the chance to see her again she’s packed up and left and 6 months later we still hadn’t seen her once even though she has three kids that were apparently left with the husband. What happened? What went wrong? What’s going on with her? We’re still on such superficial pleasantry status that I don’t have the right (or maybe just the guts) to ask these questions. These neighbors are the drinking, smoking, cursing out their children at the top of their lungs kind of people – yet they go above and beyond in doing acts of kindness towards us and put our neighborliness to shame. How have we shown Jesus to these people who live right next door?
And now my little old lady has gone missing.
My Grandpa died of cancer back in 1995. My Dad said that when my Grandpa knew he was dying, he was expressing great regret for all the time he wasted, and all the opportunities missed for telling people about God. From everything I remember and have been told about my Grandpa – he was the kind of man who didn’t just seize every opportunity he had, but he went looking for opportunities to share Jesus with people every chance he had. It’s astounding the amount of lives that he affected. Yet here he is at the end of his life wishing he did more. That’s stuck with me. If at the end of his life he felt like he’d wasted so much time – how am I going to feel about what I’ve done with my life? I live in a constant state of seeing opportunities plain as day in front of me, and thinking “I should do something about that.”
Someday. Tomorrow. Next time.
He who knows what he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.
We listened to a sermon recently by Rob Bell that helped to poke at the regrets I’ve been feeling. He told of scenarios of evil in the world. Christians are seeing these situations and crying out to God “Where are you?” And in this illustration God’s response to man is “Where are you?” God has chosen us to be the message in this world of evil. We are not just the vessel carrying this message to the world, we ARE the message. Our lives are the message. Our reaching out to people, our demonstrating God’s love, our doing the things that Jesus would have done in the face of the evils of this world – poverty, pain, suffering. We are the message. We are God in this world. What are we telling people with our lives?
These are just some things that have been on my heart. I haven’t done anything about it yet. But maybe next time I go to the park, I will cross paths with a little old lady in tattered slippers.
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