Tonight I am reading a card I got in the mail today. I'm always amazed by the cards I receive....the words and thoughts are such a blessing. In fact I keep all the cards I receive. I have boxes and drawers full of cards from decades in the past. They are a living history of people and events in my life.
As a pastor relationships are most important to me. I really do love and care about people and what happens to them...so when they share a card with me it means a lot.
Tonight the card is from a dear friend who was part of our church several years ago. His words humble me....he said, "I only wish I was still under your leadership. I send this so you know what your leadership did mean to me and my family. Thank for being such a great pastor. Matt."
Words like that make me say, "Wow...." But I must tell you the truth....all I did with Matt, all I ever do is just love people and care about them. If every person is important to God, then how can I view them any less than he does? So the cards for me are reminders of lives, of people I have cared for and loved. Many of those people are dead now....but I have their cards, their words to me. They are reminders of lives God let me touch, and lives that touched me.
The card that most surprised me was a card we got years ago from Pauline. Pauline was a dear lady who loved the Lord and was a member of my church. I had just done her funeral a week earlier....but then we get a card from her. It was her handwriting, I knew that, dated only a couple days earlier.....but she had been dead for more than a week. It was a handwritten letter from Pauline and it began this way, "Well, I have been in heaven for a week now, and I just wanted to write you to tell you how wonderful it is here...." She had written these letters weeks earlier as she was nearing death, and had given them to her nephew to mail a week after her funeral....what a card that was!
Well....I was just thinking tonight about people. The people whose lives changed me, and lives that, through God's grace, I changed. I have their cards...and as I thought about them I just wanted to share a couple of those lives with you.
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