Grand Things Are Sometimes Small Things

“The mission really helped me get back on track when I had lost my way,” said Fred.

Fred’s mother was a strict Jehovah’s Witness and made him “tow the line.”  His father, on the other hand, he described as a “street person.”  His father wasn’t homeless, but he survived by wheeling and dealing—honesty optional. As a child, Fred saw things he said no child should see.

Fred graduated from High School on June 25, 1971.  On June 26 he started a full time job, a job he had secured several weeks before graduation.  He said it was a time when one could quit a job in the morning and have two more job offers by sunset.

Things did not continue to go so well for Fred.  He sat on the fence between his mother’s and his father’s way of life; he “fell to his father’s side of the fence,” he shared.  Drugs and alcohol took control of his life.

The people at Community Missions of Niagara Frontier Inc. took Fred in and stood by him as he got his life back together.  They were patient and gracious to him.  He went on from there to work 27 years for the same employer and then retired.  Now that he is retired he spends his time at the mission center giving to others what he received there so many years ago.

I met Fred in the dining room of the mission center during our recent Region mission trip to Niagara Falls.

Fred’s story chronicles one life put back together by the love of Christ made palpable through faithful and caring people.  Fred’s story of healing and renewal is nothing less than stunning.  Stories like Fred's rarely make the evening news, not even the local newspaper.  It seems like a small thing in our big world, but the most stunning things in life are often born of nothing more than simple kindness and respectful attention.

To be used by God in the healing of lives, we must go where people are and hear their stories. How can we structure our lives and the lives of our congregations to go where people are and hear about their lives?  Mission may be no farther away than the next person we meet.

When you have done it to the least of these, you have done it unto me—Jesus (Matt 25:40)

James Kelsey—Executive Minister of the American Baptist Churches of New York State