"Did you find out the answers to the Jonah question I gave you last week?" A man at church asked as he approached us last night. Oh no, we'd forgotten about it and didn't even remember the question! He said the question was, What are four things the church could learn from the whale?
"To spit out evil?" I took a guess. Wrong. Then he told us:
1. It took him (Jonah) in when no one else would.
2. It gave him a place to pray.
3. It pulled him up when he was on his way down.
4. It set his feet on solid ground.
We smiled and laughed appreciatively. Then the nice, if slightly eccentric, youngish fifty-something began to tell us a story he had composed in rhyme. By way of explanation, he said he had never been close to his dad. The poem was about someone being estranged from their father, then finding all the qualities he had missed in his dad in his Heavenly Father. It was rather profound, and I told him he should make a song of it, since he is a talented singer.
"I did!" he replied, and then sang the touching song to us as we stood in the aisle while the lights blinked, signalling that church was over.
"Have you written any more songs?" I asked. We always enjoyed his singing and his remarkable skill at the piano when he could be persuaded to present something in church.
"No," he answered. "You see, I was exposed to lead when I was young and I can't remember anything." What? This was hard to believe about this gifted, at once shy-and-friendly, though slow-to-warm, person! But what he said next shocked us even more.
"I can't read or write," he confided. To our disbelief, he told us he had managed a business and worked on many jobs in responsible positions. As if he sensed our unvoiced questions as to how he did this without reading, he said he could follow along somewhat on a printed page.
Wow! This must be the reason he would not sing or play something someone requested, or participate in a song out of the book. He couldn't read the words! We had known him, if slightly, for several months, so this was a surprise.
My husband and I were still marveling over this brother's revelation on the way home. "It kind of makes me feel ashamed at complaining over anything," I said, "At least we had fathers who loved us, and we can read!"
Lord, let me not ever judge or criticize anyone's shortcomings. They maybe dealing with things we know nothing about!
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