Help Me Live Right
Ray and I have enjoyed being folks filling out visitor cards at church this spring while we have traveled to one homeschool convention after another, but we didn’t need to fill out a card yesterday. We visited a church in Richmond whose minister we have known for many years. In the late 1990s the church where Ray was serving as minister decided to become involved in an evangelistic outreach somewhere in the United States that was close enough for members of our congregation to travel there to help. We learned about a ministry student who was eager to plant a church in Richmond.
Ray and I came to love this young man, his wife, and their four children who soon moved there to fulfill that dream. They rented a storefront in the heart of Richmond and began reaching out to the neighborhood. We have been blessed to visit this church several times over the years and to watch it grow, but it had been three or four years since we had visited them. By the end of the service yesterday, Ray was in tears of joy. I was slow — my eyes didn’t fill up until we got to visit with the minister afterward.
When the service began, the storefront was packed with people — five white, including Connor, Ray, and me — and the rest African American. The beautiful singing began as soon as the service started when eight or ten enthusiastic men came into the auditorium from the back, singing a song I had never heard before. Among them was James’ only son, one of the twins who were little ones when we met the family. The song was a responsive one in which the congregation repeated words the men led us to sing. Those words were powerful:
Oh, Lord, help me live right while I run this race
Because I don’t want to run this race in vain.
There was more beautiful singing. We shared the Lord’s Supper. Our friend’s sermon was powerful, as his always are.
For the last song of the service, James’ son came to the stage, took a microphone, and led us in another song that was new to me (but was thankfully in the program). Jason sang and we repeated.
And, when it was over, we had wonderful visits with James, his wife, and each of the children, two grown young women and Jason and his twin sister who are graduating from high school this spring.
Oh, Lord, help me live right while I run this race
Because I don’t want to run this race in vain.
Isn’t that the prayer — expressed or unexpressed — in each of our hearts? And our prayer for our children, too?
Do all things without grumbling or disputing;
so that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent,
children of God above reproach
in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation,
among whom you appear as lights in the world,
holding fast the word of life,
so that in the day of Christ I will have reason to glory
because I did not run in vain nor toil in vain.
Philippians 2:14-16
I pray that your children and mine will be blameless and innocent children above reproach in the midst of this crooked and perverse generation and that they will appear as lights in the world . . .
. . . holding fast the word of life. In other words, I pray that they will live right.
AMEN!