Dec. 29, 2019

 God appears to people in delightfully surprising ways.   God appeared to Moses in a burning bush and to Paul in a bright light on the road to Damascus and of course in the person of a little baby in Bethlehem.  Sometimes God speaks through angels—who look like angels or like people.  Jesus appeared incognito to two disciples on the road to Emmaus and to John while imprisoned on the Island of Patmos.

I was taught that God doesn’t speak—let alone appear—after the resurrection of Jesus, which is curious to me considering how many people throughout the centuries have had visitations and visions of the divine which are inexplicable and miraculous.  I remember reading an article in Guideposts magazine when I was young about a boy who got bit by a rattlesnake and was delivered to his parents doorstep by an angel.  My sister Sue fell into the Colorado River when she was a young woman and was pulled out downstream by a mysterious man who appeared and then suddenly disappeared.  To this day she is convinced he was an angel.  And so it goes, story after story, encounters too numerous to name, God appearing to people in the most unexpected of ways and places.

Yesterday it happened to me.  I met Theresa.  It was a brief encounter lasting only a few minutes, but the memory of it will last me for more than a lifetime.

The day had begun for me by looking out the window at the snow gently falling on the earths brown surface while reading a section from the book “Beauty”.  It was as if the words were leaping off the page in order to illustrate in nature the description given.  Hiking in the sacred silence of a snowfall is like salve for one’s soul, and so a little later in the morning I joined my friend Brenda for a long hike into the foothills just west of the city of Boulder.  The weather dampened the desire of many hikers to be out in the pristine landscape, and so we met very few fellow travelers.  We were graciously afforded the opportunity to concentrate on our conversation which also traversed various terrains, from the human desire for power and control to the apparent need we have to look for answers in life rather than being content with living the questions.  There were frequent pauses to soak up the surroundings, feeling the wonders of God’s marvelous work in creation.

As we came off the path and back into the outskirts of the city we passed a church.  We were compelled there to pause by some unseen hand for the purpose of considering what type of church this was.  There were two signs which seemed to convey different messages.  The church appeared to be open,  so I climbed the four or five steps leading up to large glass doors and passed through the welcoming portal.  Inside the entranceway there was a long table set with various breakfast food items, and to the side of it another smaller table with a coffee and tea service.  Standing in front of the table was a person who appeared to be an African-American woman about the age of 70.

“What brings you here today?” she asked.

“We were just wandering by and decided to drop in”, I replied.

“Well then, I just have to know you”, she said.  And then she proceeded to recount of a recent mission she had completed and how she had returned to Boulder for the purpose of reaching out to the young people who are “beset with addictions to alcohol and drugs.”

“And what is your name?”, she asked.

“Ralph”, I replied.

“You are a minister, and interested in people and some sort of healer, maybe a doctor”.

I was stunned!  In one sentence she had briefly summed up my previous and current occupations as well as my life vocation.  But it wasn’t just her words.  It was the way she engaged me, warmly inviting like the feeling I had as a child when I would go to Grandma Jeremy’s house and I would enter into her kitchen which smelled of fresh-baked bread and see her in her apron and black “granny” shoes and she would embrace me, and I would melt into her.  That’s the feeling I had with this woman.  There was a special essence about her which transported me outside and beyond myself.  I felt both energized and completely relaxed.  I wanted to know who this person was that seemed to know me so well, though she had never met me.  And so I asked her, “And what is your name?”.

“Theresa”, she replied.

I wondered if that was REALLY her name?