Seasons of Encouragement

This morning when I woke up, I got an email. Not an unusual occurrence, always a welcome one. This particular email was from Gene Smillie, responding to my monthly newsletter. And in a few off-the-cuff sentences, he managed to distill all I had said, reflect back the best of it, encourage me, and give me hope for what God might be up to in my life. Wow. Now that's the kind of teacher I want to be!

So as I sipped my morning coffee, I was thanking God for that encouragement, and He brought to mind just what a long and unexpected story He's told with the Smillies and I over the past 20-some years. And it occurred to me that God seems to bring people in and out of each others' lives unpredictably and yet perfectly purposefully in the retelling:

Gene Smillie baptized me. When, at age 5, I decided I wanted to be baptized to tell people in public that I wanted to follow God, I wanted Gene to do it. Mostly because he told stories in a Donald Duck voice and kept bubbles in his center desk drawer at church. And he was a garbageman. Very cool. I think he was also our associate pastor... My memories of that time aren't particularly linear- I remember him making me and my family laugh, I remember everyone being excited when he and Susie announced their engagement at church camp after I had stubbed my toe really hard, I remember being sure I would drown and die during my baptism when I saw the light fading from under the water, I remember grasping onto his arm with all my might when he pulled me back out. I also remember searching for his and Susie's house in Santa Fe late one night, and my mom finding it because of the paper wedding bells on the front door. All of this was during my pre-school years, so if I have the details wrong I hope he (and my mom who has a more cogent memory of this time period than I do) will forgive me. But I'm sure about Donald Duck and the baptism near-death experience. Those are seared in my memory. :)

Years went on, he and Susie moved to Africa as missionaries, we prayed for them, they had kids, I'd read letters from them now and again and smile when they came back to Los Alamos to visit. I remember he was one of the few people who could match my dad in enthusiasm and craziness. Somehow their family ended up in Chicagoland at the same time I was there. I remember hearing him preach at a Chinese church, a few sentences and then a pause while it was translated. I decided it was the perfect way to hear Gene teach- I actually had time to absorb and understand the depth of what he said!

Again the chronology gets a little fuzzy, but God brought the Smillie family back into my life at a critical time- they were visiting Los Alamos and needed a place to stay; I was renting my parents' huge house, living there alone, and had just gone through some pretty major relationship trauma. I was all primed to become a completely anti-male angry cat lady, and suddenly my house was filled with Gene, Susie, and their 3 teenage boys who ate more than I believed humanly possible. They also got me to laugh. Hard. Through them, God kicked some holes in my bitterness and began healing me.

Fast forward 6 or 7 years, and now I'm in Kenya, sending out monthly emails. I stayed in contact with Gene and his family, so they're on my newsletter list. And these past few months, Gene replies in his conversational way and draws out the core of what's going on in my life, allowing me to observe it more clearly and thank God for it. I especially need that distilling right now; I'm so close to all the changes that I can't quite see the pattern.

And isn't that part of what the Body of Christ does for one another- recount God's redemption story, be witness to His good work in each other's lives, reflect what God is doing so He can be seen even when we're blind? I love that I get to serve a God who puts together a little girl and a pastor/garbageman for a multi-decade trek of trial and encouragement. That's a tagline for a movie I'd pay to see simply because it sounds so weird! I notice that Gene's impact on my life isn't about how much time has been spent. It's all about what God choses to do with a few words here and there, the mundane streaked with the surprising over the span of decades and continents. There are lasting griefs in each of our lives, but bottom line, God tells a good story. I got a glimpse of it this morning.