Two Rain Storms, 25 years Apart

Monday my friend Barbara White drove over to our house through a blinding rain to pick up some materials for an art show next weekend.

Barbara attends an art class in which she painted the scenes which my daughter-in-law Helen, a graphic artist, transformed into book covers for the four books collecting Barbara’s newspaper columns, the Along The Way series.

Barbara’s books are available through my on-line book catalog at www.bluefishbooks.info

The art teacher sponsoring the show wants to feature Barbara’s original paintings along with the book covers as the centerpiece for the show.

I printed some preview chapters from each of the four books as part of the display. Then Barbara and I drove up to Silver Star for delicious Chinese food. Barbara dropped me at my house on her way to run other errands.

Again, there was a blinding rain.

This weather reminded me of how Barbara and I became friends about 25 years ago:

This is a weird friendship because, other than a mutual regard for Jesus Christ and a love for Chinese food, Barbara and I have virtually no other common ground. She is an opera buff and I have no taste in music. We both worked for the newspaper but she was an exalted editor, while I was a mail clerk. She was quite wealthy, I supported my family with the help of Food Stamps. She is a local celebrity, I’m unknown. She moved in realms of high society, lead retreats, enjoyed luncheons with the bishop, etc.

Nothing in common.

I had a nodding acquaintance with Mrs. White through the newspaper. She read a magazine article I’d written about family prayer and came to dinner at our house once to write an article about my family and how Ginny and I worship with the children.

But I didn’t know the lady at all except from a far distance.

News came that Barbara was hospitalized facing cancer surgery.

I felt an odd urge to go visit her the night before the scheduled surgery. I planned to just pop in and out because I was sure that swarms of editors, reporters and other famous people would be visiting and I certainly had no place among them.

It would be silly for me to even put in an appearance but I felt strongly that I should.

Now, at the time, Ginny, our four children and I lived in an upstairs apartment across from a school in Springfield, one of the rougher slum sections of Jacksonville.

That afternoon as Ginny and I stood at the front window looking down at our car which was parked on the street, we saw a mature gentleman walking past. He appeared clean-cut and was dressed as though he had just come from church or something of the sort.

As the man neared our car, he passed a chain link fence surrounding the school playground. He turned aside and grabbed the corner fence post and ripped it up out of the ground. The cement clump anchor came out of the ground with the metal post.

The man swung this post over his head as a club and smashed our car window.

He dropped the metal post with a clang on the side walk, wiped his hands and continued his stroll as though nothing had happened.

How bizarre!

Obviously this proved that God did not intend for me to drive far across the city to visit the editor in the hospital.

Yet the feeling persisted that I was supposed to go.

Ginny and I talked and prayed about the matter but the compulsion to go grew stronger and stronger. It made no sense at all. I hardly knew this lady and we hardly had gas enough to drive anywhere and with the car windshield smashed out…

The feeling that I was commissioned to go resisted all common sense excuses.

After super I showered and got dressed still debating whether or not I should go.

A rain storm broke. A super driving gully-washer, frog-strangler of a rainstorm.

I could not drive in that.

Not with a missing windshield and glass shards all over the soaking car seats…

“In as much as ye have done it unto these, the least of My brethren…”

We just knew I had to make that drive regardless of external conditions. Ginny and I felt this trip was a divine mandate for me.

Few other cars ventured on the streets that night; the storm was too violent. Roads flooded. Branches across the roads. Traffic lights out. Electric lines down.

Blinding, torrential rain driven horizontally by the winds.

I got to the hospital soggy.

I went up to the room and found Barbara alone praying on the eve of her cancer surgery. Not one other person was there. The violent storm kept her friends from visiting till the next day.

For several hours we talked about Christ and the wonders of His love.

And she and our family have been fast friends for the following 25 years.

Yesterday’s rain storm reminded me of how this odd friendship began.

I don’t put a lot of stock in religious feelings. The vision or compulsion or urging may indeed be, as Scrooge said, an undigested bit of beef.

But…

When we feel that God is guiding us to do something out of the ordinary and even against common sense, we never know what will result unless we obey in spite of the circumstances.

We’ll never know — unless we obey.

Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness.