About a month ago, ok, six weeks or so ago, I was out yard saleing. This was one of those days when I wasn't really feeling it but there were two sales I wanted to go to. I don't remember the first but the second was a little ways out in the country. I kinda skipped all the stuff up by the house for the little bit of tools in front of shop. I was listening to this old guy tell his war stories to another customer then after he left it was my turn to try saving a few bucks on the battery charger I really wanted.
It's funny how people will tell their whole life story to someone they just met but that's kinda what he did. First was Vietnam, 1962. He was on a gunboat mapping out all the rivers. I don't remember the exact numbers but something like 175 guys went over and 30 or so came back. Then he talked of all his illness, relating much of it back to agent orange, and how the government denied the existence of it and therefore denied help for his health problems. Then we got rudely interrupted by a phone call. It was his son.
After the call was over he talked of his 40 years as a tough guy biker. How he used to ride with all these bad dudes. Then how his ex showed up one day with his son and some clothes and said, Here, take him, I can't do it any more. How his buddies couldn't believe she would leave the kid with him. Then he told me about what a kind and generous man his son had become. And how proud he was of him. Of how one day the boys mother came to him and thanked him for being such a great father and raising their son up the way he did.
Then came the story of being in a bar with his biker buddies one day some thirty odd years ago. Of this young girl in the bar who was being abused by these guys. Of how he took her out to his truck and told her to stay while he went back to the bar and finished his business. Of going back to his truck, back to this girl, who was so scared she was shaking. Terrified of the rape and abuse she was sure to suffer at the hands of this man.
Upon arriving at his house he told her, you can stay as long as you want with one condition, you are never return to that bar. Fast forward thirty some years to a phone call at a yard sale from a son to his father. A son who would tell his father that this now mid thirty year old woman and her son had just left a bad situation leaving them homeless and looking for help. This father who has no home of his own, but is living in a small trailer. This father who says, tell her I will get a house and she can come and live with me as long as she wants. This father who has been the hands and feet of Jesus many times without even knowing it.
Somewhere in the middle of this conversation we began to talk about Jesus. Somewhere in the middle of his story Jesus had found him. He says sheepishly, I don't normally talk about these things. He says, I have never found a church where I feel accepted. We talk about church, about the Bible, about talking to God. This big brave man is embarrassed to talk about God. Somewhere God got a hold of this man for some reason I don't know. For some reason God sent me to that yard sale, not just for the two battery chargers I got for $35, but to talk to a man about God. I have a feeling that God was not finished with him yet, and I know He's not finished with me yet. I can't help but have my heart warmed every time I think of this hardened biker Vietnam vet who's heart God is after. My God is good. His purposes I don't understand, but He is good. Amen!
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