"MYSTERIOUS WAYS"

The brand new pastor and his wife were excited about beginning a new church in the Dallas metroplex. They an older vacant building but didn’t seem to need anything except a deep cleaning and fresh paint.

They worked hard; cleaning, plastering walls, painting, installing donated pews and carpeting. Finished and ready to open the church doors, severe thunderstorms hit the Dallas area dumping several inches of rain for the next three days.

The new pastor went to the building which was now his first church. His heart sank when he saw that the roof had leaked, causing a large area of plaster about 20 feet by 8 feet to fall off the wall just behind the pulpit, beginning about head high. The pastor cleaned up the mess on the floor, and not knowing what else to do but postpone the first church service and headed home. On the way, he noticed that a local business was having a flea market type sale for charity, so he stopped in.

One of the items was a beautiful, handmade, ivory colored, crocheted tablecloth with exquisite work, fine colors and a Cross embroidered right in the center. It was just the right size to cover up the hole in the front wall. He bought it and headed back to the church.

By this time, it had started to storm again. An older woman running from the opposite direction was trying to catch the bus but just missed it. The pastor invited her to wait in the church for the next bus. She sat in a pew and paid no attention to the pastor while he got a ladder, hangers, etc., to put up the tablecloth as a wall tapestry. The pastor could hardly believe how beautiful it looked, and it covered up the entire problem area.

Then he noticed the woman walking down the center aisle. Her face was like a white sheet. "Pastor," she asked. "Where did you get that tablecloth?" The pastor explained. The woman asked him to check the lower right corner to see if the initials EBG were crocheted into it there. They were. These were the initials of the woman, and she had made this tablecloth 35 years before, in Austria.

The woman could hardly believe it as the pastor told how he had just gotten the tablecloth. The woman explained that before the war, she and her husband were well-to-do people in Austria. When the Nazis came in, she was forced to leave. Her husband was going to follow her the next week. She was captured, sent to prison and never saw her husband or her home again. The pastor wanted to give her the tablecloth, but she made the pastor keep it for the church. The pastor insisted on driving her home. That was the least he could do. She lived in a Dallas suburb and was only in Dallas for the day to do a housecleaning job.

A few days later the new pastor, proud of his new first church opened the doors for the first church service. The church was almost full. The music and the spirit were great. At the end of the service, the pastor and his wife greeted everyone at the door and many said that they would return. One older man, whom the pastor recognized from the neighborhood area adjacent to the church continued to sit in one of the pews and stare, and the pastor wondered why he wasn't leaving. The man asked him where he got the tablecloth on the front wall, because it was identical to one that his wife had made years ago when they lived in Austria before the war.

He told the pastor how the Nazis came, how he forced his wife to flee for her safety, and he was supposed to follow her, but he was arrested and put in a prison. He never saw his wife or his home again. 35 years had passed and not a day passes without wondering what happen to his beloved wife.

The pastor asked him if he would allow him to take him for a little ride. They drove to a Dallas suburb about 8 miles away and to the same house where the pastor had taken the woman who missed her bus a few days earlier. He helped the man climb the three flights of stairs to the woman's apartment, knocked on the door, and he saw first hand how God can work in mysterious ways.

Yep, God has a way of doing things which leave us completely bewildered. Take for instance God telling Joshua and the children of Israel to march around the walls of Jericho for a week (Joshua 6:1-4) or the crazy life of Joseph to be sold as a slave by his brothers to end up as the Governor of Egypt which allowed him to save the same evil brothers from the famine. (Genesis 37:1-50:26)

Face it folks, God knows how hard our heads can be so He knows it takes some form of shock and awe to get our attention. We may not understand why it takes being sold into slavery by our own family or why it takes 35 years to reunite this loving husband and wife but one thing is certain, God knows why and knows why it was best. (Proverbs 3:5-6) In short, God calls if faith. He wants our faith and trust in Him to know what’s best.

Merciful Heavenly Father, forgive us for having such little faith in You. Forgive us when we are going through the storms of life doubting You will have a silver lining waiting on us making things better than before. Guide us to avoid feeling bad and to leave our heavy loads “Down By The Riverside."