10.31.05
Posted in Uncategorized on October 31st, 2005 at 3:14 pm by Anthony Parker
by: Anthony Parker
Tonight we were going to have sandwiches for dinner. Now, I don’t mind a good sandwich now and then, but they are not exactly on my list of favorite dishes. But we arrived home exhausted after a “day off†of 4 hours on the road, medical tests, grocery shopping, and a couple of hours at the pool. We ended up driving for about an hour in the dark, which we really don’t like to do here in Togo. There is a danger of car jacking, not to mention the traffic hazards of meeting semi-trucks while crossing poorly marked one-lane bridges in the dark.
By God’s grace, we made it home safely, unloaded our groceries, and were just getting ready to start thinking about sandwiches when a smiling woman walked though our door carrying a basket of food. The woman was Marie, one of our oldest African friends, and truly a note of grace in our lives.
We first met Marie when she came to work for some of our teammates in Benin over twelve years ago. Her honesty, faithfulness, and loving nature have led us and others to make sure that she stays around. Right now she works a couple of part-time jobs for the missionaries here in Tabligbo, helping with housekeeping and child care.
Although she is one of a relatively few West Africans with gainful employment, Marie has known her share of hardships in her life. When she and her children decided to follow Jesus several years ago, her husband cut all of them off from any financial support although he had a relatively stable government job. He passed away a few years ago, but persecution continued from his family, as Marie’s brother-in-law threatened her repeatedly with eviction from the family compound. The main reason that Marie, who is in her 60s, still works today is to help support her youngest son, Maxime, who is a student at the university in Benin.
Maxime has been visiting Marie for the past few days, and had caught a lift with us down to Lomé, Togo’s capital, today to visit a friend. Tonight when Marie showed up, Maxime was with her, and we all shared a wonderful meal of “pâte rouge†(corn paste cooked with tomatoes and spices), couscous, chicken, moyo sauce (sautéed tomatoes and onions), and hot green pepper.
It’s difficult to express how much that gift of a home cooked meal meant as we came back from an exhausting day. It sure beat sandwiches. I’m grateful for this “grace note†in my life today, and hope that I can remember how much these “random acts of kindness†can mean in the lives of others.
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10.28.05
Posted in Uncategorized on October 28th, 2005 at 2:26 pm by TCS
by: Tommy Stewart
My Great Aunt Rachel who I always called Aunt Rachel, died this week. She was 96 years old. She had ALWAYS embodied a Grace Note to me.
In the years that have passed since I lived in the small town that I grew up in, I didn’t see Aunt Rachel all that often. But I feel a profound sense of losing something with her being gone.
Aunt Rachel would always make homemade fried apple pies for me. That recipe died with her. She told me over and over that she had tried to make them once and pour the ingredients back out so that she could measure them. She claimed to have lost the paper she wrote it on. I suspect that she wanted to keep that secret. I don’t even want one of those pies made by anybody else.
Aunt Rachel was gifted at any number of things. She had won hundreds and hundreds of blue ribbons for things like jelly and quilts and pies. She kept a garden up till a few years ago. She was upset this year as she knew her figs were ripe and the birds would get to enjoy them. So her daughter arranged for someone pick them and send them to Memphis where she was staying.
I have tried to think of a defining moment of Grace that Aunt Rachel had shown to me. I can’t come up with one. Instead I come up with a life of Grace.
Philip Yancey defines grace as: There is nothing you can do to make God love you any more and there is nothing you can do to make God love you any less. I have always loved that definition.
Aunt Rachel loved me just as I am. There was never anything I did to earn her love, there was never anything that should have distanced her love for me that had effect.
I know that she loved me always.
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10.26.05
Posted in Uncategorized on October 26th, 2005 at 7:14 pm by Dee O'Neil Andrews
by: Dee Andrews
In this age of widespread technology that links people together in seemingly every aspect of their lives with many new ways and links being created every day, I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised that my latest grace note came into my life by some of those means. And, yet, somehow I was. I suppose it’s because most of the time the “linking” technology seems much more likely to separate us than to connect us, you know.
Although, I suppose, in reality it all started through a totally natural event, hurricane Katrina. At least that was the cog that started the wheels turning in the hearts and minds of individuals far away that led to, and is still leading to, acts of kindness and goodness too numberable to relate here in the “Katrina Zone.” But, more on that in a minute.
The other, even
greater surprise was that the grace note came through channels that one these days normally doesn’t expect or even anticipate any more, sadly enough. And that was the old-fashioned sought after and carefully cultivated “customer service” and caring on the part of large corporations and their employees for all of those vast numbers of people they did business with day in and day out.
I mean, when was the last time
you really expected much help when calling a company or corporation on an 800 number, by trying to find anyone “human” through a website or otherwise online or through a maze of computerized voices and punched in digits on a telephone? Right! Those instances are few and nowadays very far between.
Well, I’m here today to commend a corporation and to highly commend one of its employees, Marilyn (no last names here), along with a “mini” grace note to someone in another corporation, Cindy, who got the wheel turning.
As I say, in a way it started with Katrina , but actually Tom and the
Picayune Item had been doing business with the second corporation,
Gazette Communications, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for a good while, although he had never spoken with anyone there but once, quite briefly. His company in Birmingham handled the transactions with Gazette, which prints the Item’s Sunday Comic sections weekly and sends them down.
It was all strictly business. But after Katrina, Tom and the Picayune Item received a “Care” package in the mail one day from someone unknown to him at Gazette full of Iowa products (mostly food) of various kinds, including a big box of
Hy-Vee specialty crackers, and he brought a few items home for us to eat after we both finally got back home.
The food was delicious, but Tom didn’t know who to thank. So last week I got online to find Gazette’s website, scrolled through several pages about different branches of the large corporation, guessed at the one I thought was the right one and blindly emailed a thank you online to whoever thought up the idea, went shopping to buy the goodies, packed and shipped them and thought enough of the people working at the Item to do something so nice for them.
She promptly emailed me back. Her name is Cindy. I commend her for thinking beyond just a corporate, business relationship between her company in Iowa with a small daily newspaper in south Mississippi and adding a much appreciated personal touch.
My “grace note” goes to a young woman named Marilyn who is Customer Service Coordinator for Hy-Vee Corporation in West Des Moines, Iowa, the company that made the great crackers we liked so much. We wanted more, so I decided to contact Hy-Vee through its website to see if we could order more from here, even though it doesn’t have any grocery stores around here or other outlets (that I could find) for ordering online from here.
Marilyn emailed me back the next morning giving me the name of the person I could contact in West Des Moines for such a special mail-order request and his phone number, which is what I wanted and really appreciated. But then, much more than that, she said that while she mostly telecommutes from Minneapolis to her job in West Des Moines, she was going to headquarters in Iowa in a couple of days and wanted to personally, mind you (not corporation sponsored or paid for), send us a package containing boxes of the crackers as a post-hurricane gift for us since we enjoyed Hy-Vee’s product so much.
I don’t know Marilyn. She doesn’t know me. Or Tom.
I haven’t even talked with her. I just sent an email online to a corporation in Iowa requesting information and she emailed me back from Minnesota with the information I requested and much more. She shared herself and showed me the goodness in her heart with actions to prove it.
I’ll have to say - my faith in God’s goodness and the goodness of individuals in all parts of this country and around the world, in all kinds of settings, in all walks of life - in corporations and businesses and schools and churches and every other place you can think of - grows ever stronger through the years of my life. Especially of late, since Katrina, my spiritual life, and I believe the spiritual lives of many, has been quickened and renewed and refreshed.
I truly believe God wants
all of us to be
His grace notes for good to everyone around us we meet and deal with. And I truly believe we all need to focus on
seeing and
taking advantage of the opportunities to do so. That’s what “Grace Notes” is all about.
[P. S. I guess it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Hy-Vee’s slogan is “A helpful smile in every aisle.” So, as Marilyn wrote me, her “company is dedicated to smiling!”. I don’t know about you, but that works for me!]
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10.21.05
Posted in Uncategorized on October 21st, 2005 at 5:05 pm by DJG
by: Donna Gossett
Last December one of our local plants lost their contract with Mercedes. At the worst possible time of year they were forced to have a lay-off. One man was particularly hard hit. He was in his mid forties, the father of five children and his wife took this most inopportune time to leave him. Here he was a couple of weeks before Christmas, no job, no Christmas presents for his children and no money to buy groceries.
One of his young co-workers took it on himself to go and buy Christmas presents for all of his children. In addition he had his grandmother go with him and bought groceries and had her to prepare some food for the family. This young man was only 25 at the time, but he was able to show grace to a man who was truly down on his luck.
In September of this year this
same young man lost his life. In a series of events I will never understand two young men entered his house and shot him, took his belongings and money to buy the same drugs they were strung out on at the time. All of the goodness, all of the generosity of this young man was snuffed out at point blank range. He never had a chance.
The man he had so freely helped last year was broken hearted. He helped the police to identify his belongings that were missing. He was key in giving them the names that would lead to the arrest of the guilty parties. He aided the parents and grandparents in planning the funeral and getting in touch with the proper people. Then in another bizarre twist to the story, all of the young man’s assets are frozen until after the trials. His grandmother did not even have the money to pay for his headstone. Who do you think spearheaded the charge to collect the money? For one who had so freely helped others $1,500 was raised in a matter of hours.
I don’t understand why his life was shortened in such a violent manner. But the above is just one of the many stories that have been told about a young man who truly knew how to return grace to those he met. I miss him and his sweet smile, but his goodness lives on.
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10.17.05
Posted in Uncategorized on October 17th, 2005 at 10:20 am by Steve Duer
by: Steve Duer
(This is one of my favorite posts from my blog. I posted it almost a year ago and thought I would dust it off to share here.)
My office has plenty of pictures of Grace. You see my almost 8 year old daughter’s name is Grace. And if I might be boastful for a moment, she is truly an “Amazing Graceâ€. However I observed something at work the other day that was a truest picture of God’s Grace I have seen in quite some time. (I have changed names for confidentiality).
Jimmy had died. It was a bit shock, he had been doing pretty good. Jimmy was classified as a medically fragile foster child. He had multiple problems that required constant care. The foster family had dedicated 2 years of their life into caring for this child who could give very little back. He had not communicated verbally since a seizure in the hospital the day the family met him. He could smile and coo but that was it. He required around the clock care. And this family had given him the best care. There was no doubt he was part of their family though not law but through love.
I am not good at handling death. Therefore my task to go to a funeral home and express my sympathy to a foster family I had met maybe once and a child I had never seen was not high on my list of things I wanted to do. (I am beginning to learn that I usually grow from the things I don’t want to do.) As I entered, my agency’s president saw me and said, the biological family is here as well. I admit it, I though bad thoughts about those people. They had reached the conclusion they could not raise a child with great medical needs and had been inactive in his life since that decision. The courts were in the process of terminating their parental rights. It had been a year since they had contact with him. Yet they show up for the funeral. The tension in the room was visible in the faces of the foster and biological family.
The foster mother was crying as she stood at the casket, her husband holding her and keeping a strong façade. The biological parents were sitting on the front pew crying unashamedly. After saying a few words to the foster family (which felt incredibly hollow) I blended into the background waiting to make a departure when the opportunity afforded itself.
Then I witnessed Amazing Grace. The foster mother walked over to the birth mother. The birth mother looked up at her with the emotions plain on her face. Guilt, regret, sorrow, shame. The foster mother leaned down and whispered something in her ear. The birth mother stood up and threw her arms around the foster mother and began to sob. The foster mother gently wrapped her arms around her and simply held her as she cried. As the birth mother cried and the foster mother held, the tension in the room slowly evaporated. Suddenly it was one group of people mourning the loss of one sweet child.
I leaned over to the agency president and said, “There is a picture of graceâ€. He agreed. The birth parents had not “deserved†to be at the funeral based on the way they had been able to parent Jimmy. Still the foster mother gave her unmerited favor. I just sat back, watched and was ministered to.
A few minutes later a new sound caught my attention. It was the birth father, he was now sobbing in the arms of foster mother. He had been the one who had made the decision that Jimmy was too much of a burden to raise. His body shook as he cried. The foster mother just kept holding him. Another picture of amazing grace.
I left soon after that with a few more token hollow words to the foster family. I called my wife to let her know I was headed home. She knew I had begrudged going to the funeral home. I told her the story and I wept. Imagine being ministered to though a death. Maybe that shouldn’t be too hard to be imagined. Amazing Grace.
Oh, love me–and right now!–hold me tight! just the way you promised. Psa 119:76 (The Message)
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10.15.05
Posted in Uncategorized on October 15th, 2005 at 9:27 pm by PatrickMead
by: Patrick Mead
She was a black girl in a 98% white school north of Detroit. The Christian high school had given her a scholarship to attend so her mom drove her in from Pontiac every morning. She felt out of place and unconnected… and she was. There were some boys in the school who — to be charitable — didn’t have other’s best interest or Jesus anywhere near their heart. They made comments to the girl, whispered, threatening, leering as they passed her by in the halls. There was nothing anyone could do unless one of the boys became more open about their harassment. One day the boys followed her in the hallway from one class to the other just to make her nervous. She didn’t want to complain or whine, didn’t want to be marked as a complainer… but her tears were finally noticed by some of the other girls and the story tumbled out.
A young man walked up to her. “I heard about what’s going on,” he said. “I’m not in your class, but if you stay in your room when the bell rings, I’ll come and walk you to your next class. And I’ll do that every period. And those boys? Don’t worry about it. I’ll have a talk with them.” The six foot two sophomore smiled at her and walked away. He escorted her to every class for the next two days. At some point during that time he got the offending boys off to the side and had a very serious talk with them. The harassment ended, girls rallied around her and made friends, and all went well.
I didn’t know anything about this until weeks later when the principal saw me and came over to talk to me. He had heard about it and wanted to thank me for raising such a son. Yes, the girl’s guardian angel was my son. I went to him and told him he did the right thing but, why didn’t he tell me about it? He shrugged. “It wasn’t anything big, dad. I knew what to do so I did it.”
Thank you, God, for such a son.
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10.14.05
Posted in Uncategorized on October 14th, 2005 at 11:58 am by Dee O'Neil Andrews
by: Dee Andrews
None of our contributors have jumped in here, yet, so guess I’m going to have to start us off over here this first week.
I wrote my first “Grace Note” post last Saturday over at
Finding Direction, and said I’d met three of them last week and I did. Here’s a short take on my second one.
I don’t even know his name. I met him unexpectedly last Wednesday while I was out on one of my marathon expeditions around Slidell trying to get some things done. And he not only took the couple of minutes to help me out greatly, but also most likely kept me from later being in a car accident.
You see - after I left home and before I reached “downtown” my front left turn signal light burned out. Traffic was horrible, as usual, moving at a snail’s pace everywhere when it was moving at all and I had several more hours of errands ahead of me necessitating several left turns on busy streets without being able to let anyone directly behind me know what I was getting ready to do. So, as soon as I could get down the main street across town far enough, which took a good while, I pulled off the street into the parking lot of PepBoys Auto supply and repair business. Luckily for me it was to my right.
I went in, went back to the parts counter and told the tall, lanky young man what I needed. He walked with me over to the the aisle light bulbs were on and picked up the right package for me, handing me the two bulbs. I then told him what my problem was and that I was afraid to be out around town now and asked if he had any idea what I needed to do to change it out or where to start.
He started walking me up to the front of the store to pay for the bulbs, pulled one out and said, “Where’s your car? I’ll run out and change it out for you while you’re paying for them - it will only take a minute.”
And he did!
I know - that doesn’t sound like a lot, but to me at the time it was. A whole lot. I’m not sure I could have gotten under the hood to get to the right place to change it without at least getting all dirty and messed up. I wrote one day before in my blog about
my total lack of auto “repair” skills the time I tried to change out a headlight and what a fiasco that was!
Plus, I used the time he was doing that to say to him, you are very kind. You must be a Christian. He said he was, where he was a member, but that he hadn’t been going to church because he worked so much and so did his wife. I asked him how they did in the hurricane, the standard question you ask everyone you meet around here, and he said they did fine. Then he said they had a little 3 year old daughter named Bailey and I told him they really needed to try to get back to church to take Bailey to Sunday school and he agreed.
It wasn’t any great mind boggling event. No big deal in life as most people measure such things. But it was a moment. A graceful moment in the middle of a busy day when two people took a few moments to help each other, talk with each other, make some connections and bring God into the conversation for good.
It was enough for me to thank God the rest of the afternoon every time I turned left for having had the opportunity to meet him. Even though I don’t know his name.
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10.10.05
Posted in Uncategorized on October 10th, 2005 at 4:56 pm by Dee O'Neil Andrews
“
By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death; he could not be found, because God had taken him away. For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God.” Hebrews 11:5
Here we commend those people who cross our paths in this world who serve as “Grace Notes” to remind us that God is good
ALL the time and makes that known through one another. May we each be “grace notes” ourselves to all others we meet along the way.
Join me in commending those you meet who “make your day” that much cheerier and brighter.
[Note: For an example, read my post at “
Finding Direction” from last Saturday. That’s where the idea for this new blog came from, thanks to one of our “founding contributors,”
Tommy.]
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