The Story Parable
How did God break into your life with one of His messengers? I was a boy that lived with my family in a little trailer in the woods of a town called Portage. The trailer court was among the sand dunes behind the grocery store own by “the Greek” called Peter. The store was just off U.S. Highway 20 on a curve that went over railway tracks called “dead mans curve”.
The trailer that we lived in was 8 by 40 feet. My father worked in construction building the steel mills around the Lake Michigan shoreline. There were 6 of us in that tiny trailer. Along with me, my two brothers Tim and Ted and one sister Terry slept in bunk beds on one side of a narrow aisle that divided the master bedroom from the kitchen and living room. A small furnace in a closet and a set of drawers that went clear to the ceiling were on the other side of the aisle.
My dad was a genius when it came to making a shack into a castle. The bunk beds had a cage on top that was my baby brother Ted's crib. I had a train set on a 4 by 8 foot board that was lowered onto the bottom bed with rope and pulleys. The bed in the master bedroom rose up into the wall so that mom could get out her ironing board and sit and iron while she watched her soap opera’s on TV, which was at the end of the trailer.
The tiny television was in the front room facing the couch at the front end of the trailer. Dad had strategically placed a huge mirror above the couch so that mom could watch it while she ironed. They would sometimes lie in bed and watch TV, and I would lean slightly out of my bed and watch TV also. I loved Steve Allen as the host of the late show. I learned to read the letters of “What’s My Line” backwards in the mirror. I made the mistake of laughing out loud, whereupon my skeptical mother said, “You can’t read those letters backwards?” But I could.
One day a man stopped at our little trailer to invite us to church. Someone had told him that my parents had both attended Nazarene churches before they were married. He invited the whole family to attend church the next Sunday. I remember him standing in our tiny living room, by the door, no room to sit down. I remember him saying there was Sunday school for the children.
We went to the small white Nazarene church on Central Avenue in East Gary, now Lake Station. Rev. Luther was the pastor, and he preached an interesting sermon about hell and sin. He told me of an eternal hell with burning flames and painful suffering for those who rejected the Son of God. The story fascinated me, and I thought to myself that it would really interesting to be there.
But then he started to tell about the dying man on the cross, who looked right at me and told me that he loved me. I did not know it was 2000 years earlier. I did not know it was on another continent, in a city near the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea in a city called Jerusalem. I did not know that the dying man spoke in Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic and Latin, and that I spoke in English. I did not know, and I did not care about those details.
I did know that my heart was already condemning me for the times I had lied, and the times I had disobeyed. The preacher said that the man on the cross had forgiven me of my sins, and all I had to do was ask for that forgiveness, and it would be mine.
I was the first one in my family who made the move towards God. I went down to the altar, and confessed my sins. The man on the cross somehow, miraculously came down from the cross and came to live in my heart from then on, till this very day.
I am now 74 years old. I have told this story, or something akin to it, every time I got a chance, any time someone would stop and listen. I rearranged my entire life so that for over 35 years every Sunday, in song and in word, in some way I told about the amazing love of a God who sent His only begotten Son to be lifted up on a cross and looked at you and me, and as He was dying, said to us that He loved us.
God has been with me these many years, and has led me through many adventures, all of which make great stories. Sit by me and I will tell you a story. Walk with me and I will tell you a story.
The stories are sometimes amazing, and sometimes miraculous, sometimes funny, and sometimes sad.
But the story that is the most miraculous, and the most amazing of all is the story of a dying man hanging on a cross in a different millennium, on a different continent, in a different language who looked across the centuries into the face of a skinny boy in a sandy woods in a tiny trailer, and said, “I love you!” #rmdo
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