When I was young enough not to be driving yet, but old enough to be cognizant enough to form opinions that I could speak confidently about, a new family with kids moved into the house that the high school coach just moved out of in our neighborhood. The father was the manager of a new factory in town and the mother was a nurse. They pronounced their words with an accent that revealed that they had moved to Brownsville, Tennessee from several states away. It was the kids that drew me to their backyard basketball goal at first; but eventually it was the open and clear dining room table in the little room that connected the garage to the rest of the house that drew me into their home. It was the receptive way they opened their home to me to listen to me talk confidently about things I could not possibly know much about. I do not remember what we drank or if there were any desert; but I remember the hospitality they offed without formal obligation and for no other purpose than to be friendly. They pushed away the clock and created space for me among all the things that required their attention.
I kind of lost track of them when I did start driving and finished high school and then on to college. After college and becoming a newlywed, I was pastor of a small church in Stanton and as a motel clerk near Jackson working all night six nights a week. This schedule was untenable because it limited me to sleeping just six times a week; and so the day came, exhausted from the lack of sleep, that I up and quit. I found myself urgently looking for another job. The little church I pastored offered minimal financial support. Janine and I moved in with Mom and Dad as our home had been an efficiency apartment in the motel, and I searched diligently but without success for work. I got very discouraged, and my prayers seemed to be bouncing back from hitting the ceiling.
One day I was driving into Brownsville on US-70 headed West and I had no idea where I was going to go next in my search for employment. My attention began to focus on the profile of the man driving the pickup truck just in front of my car in the line of traffic. “I think that is my neighbor,” I said to myself. The truck pulled into the Kroger parking lot and I followed. He got out and I got out and shouted at him. To cut to the short, I asked my neighbor if he was hiring at the factory. He indicated he had openings on the third shift. “Doesn’t anyone have daytime work?” I thought in frustration. Without any apprehension, I confided in him that I had just left the motel job because it was third shift. “Didn’t he have something available in the daytime?” He smiled the kind of smile you put on when you are talking to someone who has not quite grown up enough yet, and said, “When can you start?” I started the following Monday.
What I have found to be consistently true in the forty-two years since then, is that discouragement is dissolved by people who decide to step outside the boundaries and do more than anyone would expect them to do to meet the need or to encourage the disheartened. When they become aware of a need, even if the person they are talking to hasn’t grown up very much yet, they offer their help. When I get discouraged – and I do get discouraged sometimes – I remind myself that for forty years someone driving the truck in front of me or someone on the other end of a telephone call has consistently appeared to counter my discouragement with gracious hospitality. Consistently God has dissolved my discouragement and he will continue to bring people into my day for that purpose.
Sometimes we are not aware of the needs that discourage. Sometimes we do not have the wherewithal to meet those needs and can go only so far in our efforts to respond. But the courageous among us will attempt to reach beyond what on the day before we would have described as something that we could not do. Then we make things happen that changes the whole world of the person that is discouraged.
Paul wrote, “I rejoiced in the Lord greatly because once again you renewed your care for me. You were, in fact, concerned about me but lacked the opportunity to show it…. But [now], I have received everything in full, and I have an abundance. I am fully supplied, having received from Epaphroditus what you provided — a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.” (Philippians 4:10, 18 CSB).
Stephen Williams