Kind words are jewels that live in the heart and soul and remain long after they have been spoken.
"A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver." Proverbs 25:11
There's just something about the people who attend church that can change people's lives.
I had an aunt who had been married nine times during her brief life. Yes. Nine times. She gave up her children and got hooked on drugs and alcohol. She broke all the relationships in which she was involved. She had major blow-ups with all of her family and no one wanted to talk to her. Later in life she mended some of the fences she had torn down, but the hard feelings were always there.
One day, she found herself living alone with no one to talk to. She was broke and her children didn't want to see her. She had not just broken, but completely buried the relationships with her family. She was scorned by society and never really knew what it meant to completely love someone.
One day during a deep depression, she decided to walk down to the church on her street corner. It wasn't much of a place. It was an old, run-down building. The steeple's whitewash was peeling off. The roof was missing shingles. There were no spots for handicapped parking in the crumbling parking lot. The bricks of the building were black with mold.
The inside wasn't much more inviting. It had old red carpet and paneling for walls. The kind of dark paneling that sucks up all the light in the room. The basement would flood when a rain came and the whole thing smelled of mold and glory days of a different era. The big wooden door was even stuck on rusty hinges when she tried to walk in.
It was about as uninviting a place you can imagine.
But, on the day she visited they were having a potluck. (Which really I think is why she went to begin with because she read it on the sign out front.) And everyone she met that day invited her to stay and eat.
And she did.
My aunt accepted Christ in that old, uninviting church.
And it changed her forever.
A couple of years later, she contracted cancer. Every day, someone from that church visited her. They would take turns driving her to the chemo treatments. She always had a full freezer of casserole meals and she always knew that at any particular point of the day, someone was lifting her up in prayer.
She rebuilt the relationships with her family. She became a part of her children's lives. She forgave all of the men who had used her and learned truly what it meant to have unconditional love.
Before she passed away, I visited her and read to her from the book of Psalms. During a lull, she weakly squeezed my hand and said, "Tio (my family nickname) would you read a scripture to me?" It was the first scripture she heard when she walked into the doors of that old rundown church. And she said she repeated it every day. When I read it to her, she weakly mouthed the words and I understood fully the power that a few simple words of scripture can have for a person.
The scripture was 1 John 3:1. It says, "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are."
At the end of the verse, she said over and over again, "And that is what we are." "And that is what we are." "And that is what we are." "And that is what we are."
There was nothing about that church that should have brought someone to know Jesus Christ. It was ugly and rundown. It was old and antiquated. But it had one thing going for it.
It had love.
Even for a sinner like her. And because of that love, she learned the power of redemption, the meaning of love and what it truly meant to be accepted as a child of God.
PASTOR TROY CONRAD IS MINISTER OF FARMINGTON UNITED METHODIST CHURCH. EMAIL: [email protected].
Religion on 02/10/2016