Leonard Stout was just putting his favorite lawn chair back onto the front porch when Paul Hodges stopped by. Leonard had worried it might blow away in the recent storm so he had pulled the chair in but now he was thinking he’d like to take in the fading light of the late summer evening in that lawn chair so he pulled it out again. Reba was fussing over her plants in the back of the house. After decades of marriage they had settled into some comfortable routines. Leonard knew she’d eventually join him on the porch so he set up her chair, too.
Paul was unexpected. Paul was much younger than Leonard, a man in his 40s who ran an upholstery shop in downtown Mattaponi Courthouse – Paul’s Plush Palace. The two had struck up a friendship a few years back when Paul invited Leonard to join him and his son on a fishing trip. It had stuck and now, whenever Paul had things to wonder or worry about, he found Leonard. This was one of those times.
“Leonard,” Paul asked as he sat down on the edge of the wooden porch with his legs dangling off the side, “does Reba ever surprise you?”
“Surprise me?”
“Yeah, you know. Does she ever do something you didn’t expect her to do and catch you off guard?”
“Reba’s been surprising me since 1957. One time she forgot to tell me the Junior Women’s Club was coming over for a meeting and they caught me watching pro wrestling in my boxers. Does that count?”
Paul laughed. “Well, that qualifies as something. But I guess I’m thinking more about who she is more than what she does.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what Belinda did to surprise you, Paul?”
“Right, right. Well, she went on that mission trip with the church, you know. They went out to Kentucky and they were working with kids at a clinic. And she hasn’t been right since she got back.”
“She’s not feeling well?”
“No. I mean physically she’s fine, but…I don’t know. She’s, uh, nicer.”
“Belinda always struck me as pretty nice, Paul.”
“Well, yeah. She was. But this is different. It’s like she has a bigger heart. Like she’s got more space for me.”
“More space?”
“Like you know how we can get so busy with the kids and work and life. She pulls crazy shifts down at the hospital. Weeks can go by and the most we talk about is who’s going to the grocery store. There’s not much space for anything else. But now I sometimes get the sense that she’s actually looking at me sometimes.
“I mean just last night I was sitting down to pay some bills and I noticed she was standing in the doorway looking at me. Made me kind of nervous so I just kept staring at the checkbook. But then she came over and touched me on the shoulder and said, ‘Thanks’ and walked off. What kind of person does that, Leonard? It’s unsettling.”
“So you’re complaining, Paul?”
“No, I’m not…well, yes, I am. The other day I was talking about this problem I was having with a chair Lunker Peabottom left for me. It’s not really a problem with the chair. It’s a problem with Lunker ‘cause he left me no instructions for what kind of fabric he wants to use in reupholstering the chair. And you can’t get the man on the phone ‘cause he’s always out working on his tree stand or working his dogs. So I’ve left like 14 different messages on his voice mail and he never returns my calls. The last message I left I got kind of ugly and I said, ‘Now Lunker, if you don’t call me back I’m going to redo this chair with purple and lime green paisley and it’ll be on you, dawg.’ And I told this whole story and do you know what she did?”
“She listened?”
“Yeah, that’s right. She listened! Not only that, she listened sympathetically. What’s up with that? It’s like there is this woman that I never really knew who has suddenly decided to show up. I blame this mission trip.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that if she changes, I’m going to be under some pressure to change, too. I didn’t bargain for that.”
“Have you talked to her about what you’ve noticed?”
“Yeah, and that’s why I blame the mission trip. She said that what she discovered while she was out in Kentucky was that she had more to give than she thought she did. She fell in love with those kids she was working with and she says she said to herself, ‘If I can love those people in another part of the country, maybe I can love the people right next to me, too.’”
“That’s pretty radical stuff, Paul.”
“You’re darn right it is.”
“You know, I do remember one time when Reba surprised me like that. It was when our daughter Naomi had her little girl, Tara. That was our first grandchild. I knew I was going to be a mess because I’m the sentimental one in this family. But we went up to the hospital that day and we were looking in through the glass in the nursery and we saw that little thing there sleeping with her hands up in the air and I laughed and I looked over at Reba and she was crying. Tears just rolling down her face. That may not sound like much, but Reba does not cry. That just doesn’t happen. This is a woman who thought Walter Cronkite was too emotional when he wiped his eyes after the Kennedy assassination. But there she was looking at that baby and I knew I was seeing something I hadn’t often seen.”
“It’s a funny thing living with these women, isn’t it, Leonard?”
“It’s a strange and wonderful thing. You blame the mission trip. I blame love.”
“Love.”
“It’s the only thing that ever changed anything for good, Paul. I mean we live with friends and spouses for years on end and we call the comfortable feeling love but it’s really just routine. After awhile we start taking the people around us for granted. We start projecting ourselves onto them. They kind of become part of ourselves and we stop expecting to see anything new there.
“But every so often they come back from a mission trip or some such fool thing and you remember, ‘O yeah…this is that mysterious and wonderful person I was attracted to in the first place. And I was attracted to her because she was different than me.’ You know, Paul, if you don’t watch it, you’ll end up seeing God.”
“What are you talking about, Leonard?”
“I’m just saying that the one thing I’ve learned from living as long as I have is that there’s nothing more interesting than people. They can annoy you. They can provoke you. They can do some incredibly stupid things, but they can also surprise you into believing that the world is a miraculous place.
“You know that place in Romans where the Apostle who’s got your name tells the Roman Christians to be ready because Jesus is coming? I believe what he tells them is that they ought to get their armor on. They have been kind of partying and doing their own thing and not really paying attention to what God wants from them. So Paul says, ‘Y’all need to take off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.’
“So what that means is that they are going to start looking different with this armor on. They are going to have to do things to keep them focused on God and Paul tells them what they need to do.” Leonard paused to see if Paul would take the bait.
“All right, Leonard. I give. What did he tell them to do?”
“Love your neighbor as yourself.”
“Didn’t Jesus say that?”
“He did. It was part of the Great Commandment. It’s in the Old Testament, too. But Paul was telling the Romans that if they wanted a shorthand for all the commandments this was it. Love your neighbor and you’ve just about got it.”
“And that helps you understand Reba and see God?”
“Well, in a way it does. Helps me understand you, too, Paul. I reckon Jesus must think a lot of love. You know he says the most important commandment is to love God with all of our heart, soul and mind and then he says this other commandment is like it – love your neighbor as yourself. So if we love our neighbor it’s like loving God. And who’s a neighbor except the person right in front of you? Doesn’t really matter who it is. That person right in front of me is the person I’m supposed to love and I can’t love them unless I see them. I mean, really see them. And if that happens, well, they’re going to surprise me.”
“You’re telling me not to take Belinda for granted?”
“I’m telling you not take any single soul for granted, Paul. Because if you love them you’re also going to learn what it means to love yourself. I don’t have any illusions that I know who I am in full. I need to love somebody to know how to love this mysterious person I am, too.”
Just then Reba came to the door. She opened the screen door and stood there looking at Leonard and Paul. She was covered in potting soil. Her hair was sticking straight up and she looked very perturbed. Obviously something dramatic had happened while she was working in the back. She opened her mouth as if to say something and then turned abruptly around and went back into the house.
Paul looked over a Leonard. “Did that surprise you?”
“No.”
“So what happened?”
“She turned over a pot in the back. It probably broke. She was going to come holler about it and maybe even use a few choice words then get me to come help her clean it up. She came to the door, saw you talking to me, thought better about it and turned around to go clean it up herself.”
“You know all that?”
“Seen it plenty of times. But if I go back there now she might surprise me.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I usually laugh and that sends her over the edge. If I go back and help without a word, she’s likely to be caught off guard.”
“Love?”
“Yep, Paul, I reckon that’s love. If you love people they don’t know how to handle you. It’s pretty unsettling.”
Leonard got up to go into the house and Paul headed back to his house down the street muttering to himself all the way. “Fascinating.”
Last week we talked about loving our enemies as the ultimate expression of what it means to follow Christ’s commandment to love. Jesus says, “What does it show if you only love those who love you? Even tax collectors and Gentiles do that.” But Jesus also sums up the law with the command to love our neighbors. And sometimes our neighbor is the person right next to us…the person right in front of us…the person we take for granted…the person who is right there waiting for us to discover the mystery that is at the heart of the universe. God is waiting for us in our neighbor. Thanks be to God.
Romans 13:8-14
Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For this--Do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not covet, and any other commandment--is summed up in this word--You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does not bring about evil for a neighbor, so love is the fulfilling of the law.
Besides this you know the time, how now is the time for you to wake from sleep, for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. The night is far gone and daylight is growing near. Therefore let us take off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.
As in daylight let us walk about properly outfitted, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual excess and debauchery, not in strife and envy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ and do not give your concern to the flesh and its unrestrained desires.
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