The Parable of the Story

 The Grace of Attracting The Best

God has given me a special gift.

He has given me the grace of attracting the best. 

My first wife, who passed away in 2008, set her sights on me 8 months before our first date, when both of us were dating others. Upon seeing me, she told her best friend "That is the man I'm going to marry!"

8 months later, on our first date, she gave me a kiss, and told me that she loved me. After 15 days of confusion on my part, I told her that I loved her, and I asked her to marry me. We were married for 40 years.

I have some of the most talented and faithful friends a man could ever possess. I blamed a lot that on my late wife Lynne, but that doesn't explain how Mary came into my life, and it doesn't explain you, my new friends on the internet.

Only the special gift and grace of attracting the best can explain why you are reading this now.

Many of you have had far more successful careers than mine. Many of you are far more adept at writing, poetry, photography, and the skills necessary to navigate this new internet world than I am.

Yet here you are, reading my blog. 

I have prayed for you. I have prayed God would rain down grace on your every step. I have prayed that grace would well out of your heart like an unstoppable flood, and the the lives you are touching will smell the aroma of the frankincense and myrrh of our Crucified Christ.

Introducing The Parables

I have stumbled into the most profound truths after making a simple observation. #rmdo

When the drought hit in North Dakota, my church assumed I had an inside track on the rain problem (watch for The Simple Observation Parable, to be published later). A farmer approached me, and told me that it was my job to pray for rain. And so began a series of events that, almost thirty years later, concluded with my daughter praying that it would not rain on her yard sale.

Following that came a vision from God that revealed to me that He had made my life and the rain miracles into a living parable. He sealed it with an incredible miracle on the evening of a funeral. The living parable taught a truth that could usher in a cascading, irreversible rain of grace that could flood the world with the knowledge of the Lord that would cover the earth like an ocean.

When I try to share these stories, I am greeted with the usual skepticism. Peoples eyes glaze over, and indifference sets in, and they begin to rationalize that it was just coincidence, even when the timing is so precise, and my list of witnesses is long.

This brings me to my next observation. This observation will lead you and I to a truth of stunning power and grace.

I have noticed that stories of miracles do not have imbedded in them the necessary grace to believe them, except for one.

I can tell you the story of Lenna, who was delivered OVERNIGHT from stage four cancer, and blood clots, and 105 degree fever, and you may question it. (watch for The Weeping Woman Parable, to be published later)

I could share about the girl who went outside the church in LaJunta, Colorado and slit her wrists lengthwise, and then came into the back of the church and threw herself on my wife in her long white dress and my wife, covered in blood stains dragged the staggering girl to the front of the church to use the phone and the evangelist at the front of the church prayed a quick prayer, and the bleeding stopped, and my late wife took the girls wrists and tried to pull the skin apart to find the slits and could not find them; and you will say, she MUST have missed them. (If you said that, you did not know Lynne!! Read The Bloody White Dress Parable, already published.)

Only one story has the grace contained within it to stop the skeptic immediately, and unglazed the eyes, and arrest the attention of the listener. When I tell this story, no one whispers, or giggles, or sniggers. When I tell the story of a lone man, who claimed to be the Son of God, whose life was full of works of mercy and compassion, led by soldiers to a cross, every one stops and listens.

When I share how they laid Him on that cross, and nailed His hands and feet to the ends of those planks, then lifted that cross up, and dropped it into a hole with a thud that wrenched at those nails, every mind sees that event, and realizes immediately that the death of The Son of God was for us, for me!.

Have you observed the same thing, how, when Jesus is lifted up in the minds of the listener, on the cross, high above the earth, that we are all drawn to Him?

Doesn’t the truth of that simple observation lead us to the conclusion that THE STORY needs to be told, so that men and women everywhere can find that powerful grace that frees us from sin and fill us with joy and the deep assurance of God’s love?

I will be a fisher of men today. I will tell you my interesting, if somewhat unbelievable stories, as bait, to lure you within striking distance of the story of the cross.

You also have a story to tell. We all do. Tell it, but always remember that all of our stories pale in comparison to the greatest of stories, the story of a bleeding, dying man who claimed to be the Son of God, who claimed to be worthy of worship, who claimed He was there to save the world, who claimed He loved you! 

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. Nederhauser 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 78 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