The Audience
When our children were very young, Ray asked me to cross-stitch a picture with the words, “Never a dull moment around the Notgrass house.” I did as he asked and added a simplified image of our first house in Mississippi. We hung it there in 1984; then in two different houses in Urbana, Illinois; and later in our home in Cookeville, Tennessee. In 2004, we hung it here. We haven’t lived a day yet when it would have been appropriate to take it down. You might not have something like it hanging in your house, but I am sure you could!
“Never a dull moment” is appropriate, not only in homes, but in all of the world. If we think we are busy, just think about the responsibilities of our heavenly Father–so many children involved in so many activities, getting into messes, having celebrations to attend. Whew, talk about never a dull moment!!
Saturday when we arrived at the service for Miss Lena, rock music blared from the park behind the funeral home. The people enjoying the park probably had no idea they were disturbing our peace as we walked from our cars to the funeral home door. My peace was disturbed in another way, because I had just read an email about the bad accident of Levi Suarez, son of the publishers of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine.
Inside were Laura’s family and their friends, including two Chinese ladies she and Larry know through their outreach to Chinese students. Our daughter Mary Evelyn has invited each of these ladies to speak to groups of children. One spoke to our local Homeschool Dramatic Society while they were practicing for Journey of Faith, a play about Gladys Aylward’s outreach in China. I remembered that, as a young woman, she had heard Miss Aylward speak in Taiwan.
The other had spoken to a group of children at our church just a few days earlier. She told of being born into a family of nine in a small village in China. She spoke of the joy of learning about Jesus and of how she wished she had known the Bible as a child. She told about the conversions of her family members who are still in China and about the persecution experienced by Chinese house churches today. She asked us to pray for China.
Leading the quartet of singers was a man we had first learned about many years before when we were still living in Illinois. In 1991 this man from a small town in Tennessee had led an effort to mail the message of the Gospel to every home in America, an effort that had done exactly that.
We saw a doctor who had just come from the hospital, not to see patients, but one particular patient. He had spent the night with his dad who recently had surgery.
In the audience was Miss Lena’s grandson, who came home from Afghanistan for her funeral.
We saw a husband who had let his marriage wall crumble a few years ago. With him was his wife who has worked alongside him to build it back.
See what I mean? There is never a dull moment in God’s world. He is busy taking care of the Suarez family and the people listening to rock music in the park. He is raising up little girls in China and directing their lives so that they will someday hear and share the Gospel. He is giving some men great vision so that they will share the Gospel with millions. He is watching over doctor’s daddies and over grandsons serving in Afghanistan. He is teaching husbands and wives how to forgive and how to rebuild their marriages. He is comforting those who suffer and those who mourn. He is taking care of us and our families, too.
But He answered them,
“My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working.”
John 5:17, NASB