Stepping Into Trouble

How does time fly by so quickly?  It seemed only yesterday that I was newly married and leaving for my honeymoon with a man I hardly knew. I did know God and I did trust that God was bringing us together, making us one. H. was a mystery at the beginning. A man deep with history and crevices in his face to prove it. As with all men who suffer tragedy, his eyes were opaque and withholding. He was the opposite of the teddy bear men who were so comforting to me.  I was attracted to his knowledge  and his profile. He did not care for either.  He had been wounded in the war. His life had been kidnapped by sorrow which he could not explain. He was a man in the shroud of divorce and abandonment. 

But he was new in the area and people were interested. Legends of his work in southern mexico abounded and made him an object of discovery—like a pebble thrown into a calm pond was his arrival. Legends also existed about a soon disappearing wife, who came and sang and left. But they were only distant stories to me. What did I have to do with him? 

I had been widowed 10 years—though not a clean cut case of life and death. But a messy separation and live in girlfriends—things which are better left unsaid. I had escaped two attempts on my life to kill me and finally come into the light of God's saving grace. I was delivered from evil and safe from the unknown dangers which stalked me and my little ones. Those stories we shall save for another time. 

It was another time now. I was a different person. I was filled with the Holy Spirit Who guided my steps.  On one evening in early March while walking through the living room, the Lord suddenly spoke, "Hans is lonely." I was offended and intrigued all at the same time. God assumed that I knew Hans. I only knew "of him" not him personally. Why didn't God use Hans' last name? God's intimacy of my thoughts was unnerving. I did know of Hans, having been introduced to him at a bible study he had attended once with his wife. I had been one of many that evening to be introduced to him. There was not a nod or a glance exchanged between us. Our daughters were friends, having met at a youth retreat. And I had, more than once, dropped my girl off at his house on a Sunday afternoon. Often I had wished myself a part of those days and those events, they seemed so carefree, so happy. But. . . I did not know the man who hid behind the laughter of our children. But I did technically know who he was and God knew that. Nevertheless, I felt that God was using this knowledge without my permission. A normal conversation would have gone something like this: "Hey, you know that guy that just came into town, whose daughter is a friend of your daughter?" This would have been the natural course of events. No, nothing of the sort with God. All that was "understood." That's how God is. I have grown used to it by now, but then it was a new thing.  Even now in thinking of all of this, my mind is staggered by everything that happened. It sort of happen to me—with my mind as a casual but interested observer. 

I located his number and invited him to a bible study. He was not interested in a bible study, but he said he would like to go out for coffee. I was scandalized. What kind of missionary didn't want to go to a bible study? But fools rush in where angels fear to tred and so I agreed. It was a horrible night. We had nothing in common. Furthermore his face was drawn, pinched together by grief.  He was not interested in the things of the Lord, he was a shell of a man, having lost everything on the mission field. Being as young in the Lord as I was, these were things I could not possibly have understood. His faith, his family, his work, gone in what a appeared an instant.  An elder in the church declined to counsel him because the elder said he was not equipped to handle such things. How was I do any better? I vowed to never see him again. I was a product of the sixties, half hippie, half "smart a..." completely unchurched and uneducated in the bible or the history of the church. I was stepping inside a snare. 

To be continued.