grass-tree-sky

Within minutes of moving into our new neighborhood, or maybe the next day, the gregarious next-door neighbor was in our front yard glad-handing us. Ray probably had twenty-five years more life experience than I, and of a radically different kind. One example; I had not spent years in a penitentiary.

Ellie was also friendly and kind but within more customary norms. It would often be the ever-effervescing Ray on the step when the doorbell sent my kids racing to greet the visitor. The sight of him brought quizzical looks to their faces. That may have begun on the day Ray beamed through the screen that Santa Claus, who was to my kids no more than a fun Christmas myth, would be coming soon. “Daddy, does Mr. Ray really believe in Santa Claus?”

Time would reveal the fog of despair that chilled these two lives next door. The day came when Ray rang our phone asking us to come over. Ray stayed seated with Ellie on a love seat while he summoned us to enter. Waiting, untouched, on Ray’s lap was a revolver. Before my shock could leap to fear Ray spoke. “Tell me why my wife and I should not commit suicide.”

You and I are always prepared to answer such questions, right?

Well, something did come out of my mouth. All I can remember now is that we listened and then offered the encouragements of true Truth. The next day I gave them a book that talked about life as they had come to experience it. Within a day or two they had finished devouring the book. Moreover, they responded and accepted its life-rescuing message.

Recently, my wife and I were gazing at a puffy pile of cumulus hurrying across a sapphire sky. We got to remembering the many times we had remarked to someone nearby about a breath-taking vista quite visible in the moment to us all. How often we would get a response that could be roughly translated, “Huh?”

While there are many folks who do appreciate the beauties of a God-absent, evolutionary accident in the cosmos, my wife and I realized that what grabs our eyes and souls also lifts us into an involuntary gasp of worship offered toward our Creator God.

Ray was back in our yard before long. He was exuding a different kind of excitement. Ray simply had to tell me that he had never seen the grass and trees so brilliantly green nor the sky so remarkably beautiful. Ray had gotten new eyes. They had come with the package of God’s Spirit entering his own.

To the day we moved away Ray and Ellie remained fully alive and free.