Howdy!
I want to tell you about a good day.
Every once in a while, a day comes along, that if you had been God, you couldn’t have made it better. Well last Sunday was one of those days.
The first thing good was church. If you are reading this and you aren’t one of those faithful kind, don’t be offended when I say I wish you could have shared it with me today. I guess sometimes that kind of comment might be about being self righteousness, but mostly, well, it’s because people who love, want to share something good. It’s like me wanting you to see a movie or read a book I loved, I just want to share it with you.
Yep, church was like that that day.
The second thing was it was the day that northwest Houston celebrated St. Pat’s Day.
Now that day has never been one of my special holidays, probably because I don’t like beer much and that’s what the day seems to be about. But my Jake, who definitely LIKED beer, started me thinking about St. Pat’s day, several years back while he was in Iraq.
You ever seen any of those pictures on MSNBC of the soldiers sitting around in the desert, leaning on their backpack, reading? They do that a lot, I think. They read anything they can get their hands on and according to Jake, all kinds of books get passed around.
So in Jake’s hands while on mission, fell a biography of St. Patrick and he AIM’ed me that “it was a really good story”.
St. Patrick, I thought to myself? Who reads that kind of thing and thinks it’s good?
As things go, I eventually found out why the story meant so much to him.
St Patrick lived about 400 years after Christ, at a time when lost of people’s lives were dark and confused. A few people had it better. A rich, privileged, and rebellious kid, at 16 Patrick was one of these, until he had a drastic life change.
The spoiled, willful teenager, was kidnapped by a band of marauders who removed him from his homeland and took him back to what is now Ireland.
Think about that!!
Without family, in a strange land, slave to his marauders, Patrick shepherded sheep on dark lonely nights and days, many of them. Away from his family, with nothing to do but think, under the stars, Patrick read, kept a journal and harbored his confessions in his heart and on paper.
Tragedy changed Patrick.
After reading the end of the story, I know why Jake liked it.
In the year 2007, to celebrate St. Patrick, two of Jake’s best friends drove Grace in the fourth largest St. Pat’s parade in North America, a couple of them rode in the back.
My friend Laurie and I stood on the road and watched Grace as she passed by, her forty foot trailer loaded with revelers, dressed in green and we caught beads and candy and smiles.
The thing about that Sunday, I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t plan the parade or Grace or Jake’s friends involvement in it. It was all God’s orchestration, from 400 years ago to a Sunday in 2007, it was all God’s design.
Some days are just about Grace, not the truck but the kind that Jake thought a lot about, the unmerited favor that can happen. Last Sunday was good, not because I planned it, not because I deserved it, but because that is the wonder of how God works.
Happy Monday.
