Zerephath

"But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when there came a great famine over all the land; and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian." When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and put him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw him down headlong.

An acquaintance of mine, whom I'll call Sylvia, went off to another state to go to graduate school (no, this isn't a story about me). She had a hard time finding a church to fit into because most of the ones she visited had rather proscribed ideas about the role of women. And as she is an extremely intelligent woman with strong ideas, she found it very hard to be minimized and have her voice silenced by patronizing comments every week in church. She didn't go very often therefore, even though she had a rich spiritual life with her colleagues at the university.

One week she decided to go to a little church nearby. It was hard to miss out on fellowship week after week when she was accustomed to participating in church. Sylvia went just about the time that the class was starting and the pastor was teaching it. Maybe it would be a good discussion.
In fact, it just happened to be about a topic that she was studying at the university, and she was eager to weigh in on it. So was everyone else. She raised her hand and waited to be called on. After nearly 30 minutes of having her hand up and listening to everyone else's comments, she waved her hand at the teacher. "Little lady, we don't have time for your remarks, so we're going to move on." The pastor smiled at her and brought the class to a close with prayer. He was probably a bit younger than Sylvia was, and it had felt strange to be called, "Little lady."

Sylvia was really discouraged, actually. She had come to church hoping against hope that somehow she could have spiritual fellowship--even that someone would simply want to have a conversation with her. It had been very difficult to live where she knew no one else and it was hard to live in a world of silence--no conversations outside of the classroom--for this long. She came to church running on empty. There was no reserve left to cope with feeling overlooked again. She felt tears coming with her head bowed during prayer. The pastor finished praying and dismissed the class. No one on the right or the left of Sylvia greeted her or acknowledged her presence.

"I'm going to sit right here until someone speaks to me," she thought. She was really lonely and had an empty house to go back to after the service. She wondered if it was worth it emotionally, to be so far from home. She could go back to her accounting job with people she knew and was comfortable with. It was hard to even get to first base with these people. But for now, she couldn't stop the tears from coming down her face. So she sat quietly, wiping her tears from her face, looking around at the close little knots of people chatting together. As they slowly drifted out of the fellowship hall into the sanctuary, she was left sitting in the middle of about 50 empty folding chairs.

The pastor's wife and another woman, however, were still talking at the edge of the room. They were talking about how important it was to get the room ready for the potluck that was to follow the service. They began taking the chairs away, one at a time, folding them and stacking them at the side of the room. Sylvia stayed in her chair, her head down, wiping away her tears.

The women folded and stacked chair after chair, moving them back away from the middle of the room. Their voices rose and fell as they walked across the room, away from one another. Almost all the chairs were stacked and they were engrossed in conversation about a potluck dish when the unbelieveable happened. There were only three chairs left--and Sylvia was in one of them. One woman took the chair to the right of her, and the other scooped up the other chair--without losing a beat in their conversation. They neither stopped to ask Sylvia what was wrong, or to greet her. They didn't even glance back at her sitting in the only chair in the middle of the room, her head down. And they walked out into the sanctuary foyer to join the others.

So there Sylvia sat, alone. It was a deeper sense of loneliness than she had when she'd walked into church that morning. It would certainly not be relieved by staying, either. Her face wet with tears and her eyes reddened from crying, she walked out of the room and headed toward the front door of the church. There stood the pastor.
"Are you leaving us?"
"Yes."
"I hope you found a real blessing here."
Sylvia paused. "Are you serious?" She invited him outside the church where she explained what had just happened and how painful it had been for her. He of course, was horrified. "I just thought someone else was going to talk with you." But it was too late to fix what had already happened and Sylvia couldn't regain her composure. She thanked him for at least taking the time to greet her, and went home.

She curled up on her couch and called some friends when she got home. At least she could have contact with people, even if it was over the phone. She didn't tell anyone what had happened that morning because it was really embarassing to her. She was a woman of faith, and many of her friends were not Christians. How could she explain why she kept trying to connect?

Later in the afternoon Sylvia went out for a walk. She lived in a tiny house at the edge of a very bad section of town--skid row. People who were high would scream through the neighborhood, roaring in paranoid rantings at the top of their lungs. Other people slept on the sidewalks or were drunk, lying under trees. Undeterred by her surroundings, Sylvia made her way down the street toward a coffee shop. As she crossed the intersection she noticed a large crowd of people standing around someone on the corner. It was a street preacher. He wasn't the histrionic, arms waving sort of preacher. He was talking in a soft, appealing voice to the group of people who were wearing raggedy clothes and huddled together. She moved closer to hear what he was saying. A large, unkempt man at the edge of the crowd saw Sylvia and motioned for her to come stand in his place. "Come on, honey. There's room for you right here" he rasped around the two teeth he had left. "Come hear what the man's telling. You need to hear it, too."

The man didn't seem to notice that Sylvia's jeans didn't have holes in them and that her blouse was new. The crowd made room for her to stand, and a number of people smiled shyly at her. The preacher was explaining how Jesus loved everyone and that when He was on this earth, He would have spent time with each person in that group.
"You are important to God," he said warmly. "You matter to Him. And even though He doesn't walk on our streets today, you can be sure that He is always right next to you. So when you are lonely, you can talk to Him because He's right next to you and wants to hear what you have to say." He smiled at Sylvia.
"He wants to know what all of you think and how you feel. So talk to Him."

Tears began to form again in Sylvia's eyes, but this time, it was for another reason. She had been welcomed, reassured, included. She could smell the lady next to her, but that lady was smiling at her and patted her arm. She was a tattered wreck. "You come back next week, honey. We're here every Sunday."

It was not "Israel" that had given her a place. It was another group of unacceptable outsiders where Sylvia found spiritual communion.
We forget that it is not always those who say "Lord, Lord" who do the will of the Father. And God's words sometimes come through unlikely conduits.

Hear the word of the Lord.