My Favorite Spelling Bee

The Bible study for six little neighborhood girls had finished, and two of them asked if I would help them with their homework that evening over at "my church." Giving it long and careful consideration, weighing the pros and cons of getting the neighborhood children accustomed to being at my church, it took me about 2.725 seconds to agree to the proposition.

While Dahlia* was down the hall on a bathroom break, Meghan* strictly forbade me from coming into the Sabbath school room where she was experimenting with the chalkboard. Complying, I stood out in the hall and waited on both girls.

"How do you spell your name?" came a query from somewhere near the chalkboard.

"M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E...that's two 'L's," I explained.

Silence.

"How do you spell God?" the voice questioned me again.

I started to move toward the door.

Meghan caught me: "No, you can't look!"

Stifling my curiosity, I dictated slowly for the 1st grader, "G-O-D".

Silence.

"Okay, you can look now!" called the grinning voice near the chalkboard.

Stepping nearer to the doorway, I read the carefully etched message in bright chalk..."I love Michelle and God." Just five words, only one sentence, but they etched themselves in my brain more permanently than on the chalkboard.

When it seems like my work is hollow, my efforts shriveling with my heart in the biting Illinois wind, I pull out a mental picture, drawn on a chalkboard in childish innocence, and I fancy a small voice asking, "How do you spell God?"

Some days I feed the lambs...and then, some days, they feed me.

*Not their real names.

New Light

Twilight was beginning to descend on the countryside out my car window as I drove back from working in a town in the north section of my district. I reached to turn the knob on my dash for the headlights and then stopped to look at the vertical selector knob to its right. Of course it wasn't anything new, it had been there the whole time. I don't know how many times in all the nearly 30,000 miles I had sat behind that wheel I had seen the rolling selector knob mutely staring at me from the dashboard .

But for some reason I never used it...not even once. For a few seconds I put my hand back on the wheel and watched the fall colors whiz past in the glory of the last rays of the October sun. I tried to remember what that knob was supposed to do. I wasn't sure. I'd never used it. Why? I wasn't sure of that either. Presumably because I thought I already knew everything the car did. Or maybe it was because I when I went down the checklist of locating all the necessary functions of my car (brakes, windshield wipers, stereo volume, etc.) I found everything I thought I needed--before encountering that odd little vertical selector knob.

I looked back at the knob. It could have been a brand-new addition to my dashboard for all practical purposes. Obviously, since I had been driving thousands of miles without it, it was rather insignificant. That or it was an emergency activation switch to launch my car into oblivion.

Was that to deter me? Of course not. My initial incredulity at the realization that there was actually something about my car I didn't know only stunned me for a second, and then I reached forward again to experiment with my discovery.

Tick. The knob rolled up to a level even with a small white circle beside it. I stared at my dashboard in disbelief and then laughed. For two years I had wondered why, whenever my headlights were on, my dash lights would dim to almost no visibility. A simple flick of selector knob, and suddenly my dash lit up, as bright as the Fourth of July, except in neon green only.

Pushing the selector up one more level added an overhead light that otherwise operated separately. Imagine that. Not only did the knob resolve a known problem, it added an entirely new capability.

For the next several minutes I drove along quietly admiring all my new lights. I couldn't help smiling when I thought how long I'd driven my car without ever trying that particular knob.

Then I thought of my Bible study contacts. I thought of all the people who turn down studying the Bible because they've "already read it from cover to cover." And I drove my car for 30,000 miles thinking I knew everything there was to know about how to operate it. Guess what--there just might be some new light you didn't already know about.

Harvest of Blessings

It's fall in Central Illinois, and everywhere you go cornfields are being harvested. Autumn leaves are just starting to show a change of color; pumpkins symbolizing fall festivities squat on every corner. The shrieking winds that accompany the arrival of autumn yield deference to the peals of a church bell. It's small town America at its finest with little trace of finery.

If I have just painted a picture of a quaint country town with religious country folk, it would not be an entirely inaccurate depiction of where I have been working lately. On the surface, one could appreciate the romantic, whimsical charm of the small town atmosphere. The work of a Bible instructor doesn't call for a shallow involvement in any town, however; and the deeper I look, the picturesque scene becomes traced over with reality.

Since I began working in this district I can scarcely get down a single street without being invited into countless homes as I give my survey. The less well-off seem to be the most generous in this respect. Perhaps they just have pity on me as I walk the streets in the increasingly chilly temperatures; in a way, inclement weather is quite an ally.

Sharon* invited me in to talk to her. Already a Christian, she told me how she has struggled to read her Bible; only recently she graduated from a child's Bible to a simple translation of an adult Bible. As health topics came up and I told her about the upcoming cooking school, she informed me that she had been praying God would send a woman into her life to teach her some better cooking to improve her health. We prayed before I left.

Norma* came to the door to answer my survey. In answer to the question, "Have you ever wondered, 'If God is so good, why does He allow so much suffering?'" she responded by telling me she had been asking that all afternoon after finding out that her son had broken his back. She then invited me in to visit, saying that she hadn't at first because she had just decided to get a drink. My coming by, she said, was just what she needed that afternoon and agreed that I could come back to study the Bible with her next week.

So I find that no town is ideal--there is suffering everywhere. There are those who are prejudiced, hurt, confused or simply uninterested. But I have been blessed already this fall to see the promise of two harvests. I am already reaping blessings, and I think that harvest value may be a great deal more significant than the corn being harvested in the field by my house.

"Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest!" John 4:35

*Pseudonym