Through the years, I've heard many Christians say how
they thought that an individual that they have had to deal with, or a situation that they have had to deal with was hopeless
and that they didn't see how it could ever turn around;That they had done everything possible and that it just wasn't good
enough or that the individual they saw before them just wasn't possibly ever going to respond to God and so they were going
to quit or just not even try with them.
WEEEEELLLLLL........Let me tell you some stories about impossible situations.
I can't Believe You Brought Him Home, and Would You Please Tell Him to
Leave!!
I was riding my bike home, one day. We lived in the church at that point.
When I passed the local library. I encountered this person who was definitely out in the twilight zone, somewhere. God told
me to talk to him and to allow him to follow me home. Oh dear!! Well... He kept coming back and walking around in circles
on the rug and asking millions of questions about EVERYTHING including a LOT about God. He almost lived with us. He ate with
us, his table manners were atrocious, and away from me, his manners matched his eating. He did a LOT of strange things around
my roommates and the other church members, but not with me. They kept coming to me and asking if I would uninvite him to our
home. But everytime I asked God, He said 'NO'. So I said 'NO'. Then one day, he disappeared and we later heard from a mutual
aquaintance that he had committed himself to the local psychiatric lockup to get away from his mother, who was worst
than he was. Then he returned one day, quite a while later,and told me that he had given his heart to Jesus in an altar call
at our main competitor, down the street-oh my- and wanted to know if I would marry him. I congratulated him on his salvation,
turned him around and sent him, I thought, to his local home. When he went back to his childhood home, all the way across
the country and took the salvation message to both his mother and his father, who both gave their lives to Jesus. His mother
died 2 months later, of cancer. No, I didn't marry him. But he became a totally changed man, sweet and calm.
Some Poor Sucker
My fosterfather and I both had the ability to discern those who had less
than pure motives and would try to warn others about them and steered clear of them ourselves, until one time, when my exroommate
and her husband got involved.
A pitiful person brought another pitiful person into our church hoping
he could dump her on us, since he didn't want her hanging on him.This is what he told us. I saw what she was and steered
clear of her. But my exroommate was a bleeding-heart do-gooder, and we had had many arguments over some of her choices
of helping others at the expense of her daughter and endangering our household.(A sexual predator was one of those choices.) She
and her husband ganged up on me over the 'fact' that I ought to be ashamed of having a home to myself and not sharing
it with this one in need. I caved in, against my better judgement. Later, my fosterfather called to tell me that some poor
sucker had taken that person in. I told him that he was talking to that poor sucker. He was shocked. But he understood
as soon as I mentioned my exroommate and her husband.
This was the year that the 4 year drought had broken in our state and the
rain was coming down in buckets. I was going to 2 schools, and working 2 cooking jobs at the time. I had to take the
bus in one direction, to the schools and one job and return home,then ride my bike 52 miles roundtrip to the second job. The
county took around 1/3 of the buses off of the road, so a lot of us got stranded out in the pouring rain for hours, with no
shelter. This was also the year, that we had a huge-huge flu epedemic sweep through the entire area. A lot of people
died from it. I got it and had no medical because both of my jobs were parttime. I would work at my first job, and in between
shifts, would curl up next to the hotwater heater and sleep because I was so cold. The pitiful person who stayed with me,
stayed in her car during the day and parked herself in the bathroom next to my bedroom all night, keeping me up. She kept
trying to move me out of my house so that she could have it, even though she had no job or income.
One day, my fosterfather called me to tell me how furious he and my fostermother
were because this person was telling all kinds of vicious lies about me behind my back. I told him what was happening in my
house and he told me to just move her stuff out onto the front porch and to tell her to leave. I did. Then at church, she
went to pursuing me while I just kept avoiding her, since I didn't see any sense in talking to her. Then she left. Months
later, she came back and started pursuing me again, while I kept avoiding her, UNTIL she cornered me. She told me that
she was sorry for what she had put me through and asked for my forgiveness. I was totally shocked. Who would have thought?!
Oh yes, as you can see, I did survive.
The Class From Hell
This is the designation that the other teachers in the school gave to this
class and were thrilled that I got it. For lack of a better description, I had inherited a class full of miniature hoodlums.
If any hijinks or violence/riots or rebellion happened in the school it ALL came out of my classroom. (This class caused me
to stop wearing skirts to work. One day, some of my students were missing, until I heard giggling coming from under my skirts.
They were on the floor looking up under my skirt.) These pintsized kids were more streetwise than the rest of us and quite
willing to put it to use. I spent the entire year surviving by constantly thinking' It's me or them. One of us is going to
win and it's not going to be them.'
I couldn't find any decent published Christian curriculum for them, so
I just used the Bible and drew stick figures to illustrate the stories,(Had to move fast to keep their attention.) with
a contract with the class, that if they listened, participated and didn't INTERUPT me, they could take home a piece of the
drawing at the end of the week to share with their families.In one of the lessons I told them that if a person didn't
have Jesus in their hearts, they would go to hell.Although I don't remember being quite that blunt about it. I just quoted
the Bible.
A year later, one of our families came to my fostermother-my boss- and
told her something that none of us would have ever imagined if we had been asked. One of my students was crying one night
as his parents were putting him to bed. They asked him why and he told them that they were going to hell. When they asked
him why, he told them that it was because they didn't have Jesus in their hearts. They gave their hearts to God, then they
each went to their parents and brought them to Jesus, and had been attending church ever since.
Now if anyone had come and asked me which one I would think would
do such a thing, This one would definitely have been near the bottom of the list. As charming as he was, he was
one of my main ringleaders in all of the mayhem and violence in the classroom.
You never know. You just never know. Don't rule anything out. Just do what
you hear God telling you to do and KNOW that whatever WORD He gave to you to send out will not come back void, but
will return with what it had been sent to get. It just won't be in our preconceived packaging nor timeline.
