Prairie View

Sunday, September 27, 2009

When a Prayer Call Sounds Like a Siren

In last Sunday's sermon David told about a recent experience in which he was with a co-worker on a job site when an emergency vehicle passed within hearing range. David commented that he was glad he was not in the vehicle's path, or involved in the emergency situation. The co-worker responded by saying that when he hears a siren, he likes to pause for a moment to pray for the people who are involved in the crisis--both those who need help and those who are coming to their aid. David appreciated the insight and urged us to consider doing this, among other ways in which we can reach out to people around us who are in need--even people we don't know.

************************

About two years ago Mark and Rose N. and their family moved here from Indiana where Mark had grown up. Rose grew up mostly in Wisconsin and Missouri, but others in her parental Hershberger family eventually moved to Kansas, so Mark and Rose's coming brought them closer to her relatives. Not many of us knew much of Mark's childhood, except for Larry B., who grew up in the same community as Mark. From him we learned that Mark had survived a horrendous accident when he was five years old and lost his arm in a farm accident. It was wrenched from his body in a forage machine--perhaps a silage wagon--and he saw it disappear with the forage. During his recovery he got many cards which his mother kept for him in a scrapbook. Some of them were from people he did not know.

Mark and Rose's family includes four children, the oldest of which was about 16 when they arrived in Kansas.

***********************

Earlier in the same year that Mark and Rose's family moved here, another family arrived. Paul and Edith and their grown children Nathan, Tresa, and Tonya came, along with their married son Conrad, and his wife Rebekka and daughter Keturah. Their married daughter Twila already lived here. This family moved here from Belgium.

Paul grew up in Kansas, but never lived here since before he was married. Much of the time he was away he was involved in a Christian ministry, either in a stateside retarded children's home, or in European missions. When they were in the states, the family lived in Ohio.

**********************

Today in church, during testimony time, Mark read aloud from a card he received when he was five years old. It was from someone he did not know. He discovered it recently when he was looking through his scrapbook.

The card said "We don't even know your name. . . We work at Sunnyhaven where there are children whose minds don't work as fast as some children's do. . . We're praying for you. . . We have a boy who is one year old." It was signed Paul, Edith, and Nathan Yoder.

*********************

Today all those people are members of the same church in Kansas. Who but God could have nudged the heart of one young family among his children to pray for and extend good wishes to another who was in crisis at that time, knowing already what no one involved could possibly have guessed--that they would one day be transplanted to the same community hundreds of miles away--that this evidence of belonging together would some day be very precious?

If David had told us such a story last Sunday in a hypothetical situation to illustrate one of the points in his message, we would have thought it too improbable to be believed. But God knew that today an entire congregation would be blessed by the simple reading aloud of a message of caring penned 34 years ago--from one well-loved church family to another, who were then as unknown to each other as the people are that we pray for when we hear the siren from an emergency vehicle.

1 Comments:

  • Wow, what a great story! And a reminder for me to reach out to others with love! ...even if it's simply letting them KNOW they're loved. Thanks for sharing. -Tryphena

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 9/28/2009  

Post a Comment



<< Home