Our house was directly across the street from the clinic
entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore .
We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms
to out-patients at the clinic.
One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was
a knock at the door. I opened it to see a
truly awful looking man. "Why, he's hardly taller than my 8-year-old," I thought as I stared at the
stooped, shriveled body. The appalling
thing was his face, lopsided from swelling, red and raw.
Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, "Good
evening. I've come to see if you've a
room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there's no bus 'til
morning."
He told me he'd been hunting for a room
since noon but with no success, no
one seemed to have a room. "I guess it's my face .... I know it
looks terrible, but my doctor says with a
few more treatments ..."
For a moment I hesitated, but his next words
convinced me: "I could sleep in this
rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning."
I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on
the porch. I went inside and finished
getting supper. When we were ready, I asked the old man if he would join us. "No, thank you I
have plenty." And he held up a brown
paper bag.
When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the
porch to talk with him a few minutes.
It didn't take a long time to see that this old man had an over sized heart crowded into that tiny
body. He told me he fished for a living
to support his daughter, her 5 children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury.
He didn't tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every
other sentence was preface with a thanks to
God for a blessing. He was grateful that no pain
accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin
cancer. He thanked God for giving him
the strength to keep going...
At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children's
room for him. When I got up in the
morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch.
He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his
bus, haltingly, as
if asking a great favor, he said, "Could I please come
back and stay the next time I have a
treatment? I won't put you out a bit. I can sleep fine in a chair." He paused a moment and
then added, "Your children made me feel at
home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don't seem to mind."
I told him he was welcome to come again. And, on
his next trip, he arrived a little after 7 in the morning. As a gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the
largest oysters I had ever seen! He
said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they'd be nice and fresh. I knew his bus
left at 4:00 a.m. And I wondered what
time he had to get up in order to do this for us.
In the years he came to stay overnight with us, there
was never a time that he did not bring us
fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden.
Other times we received packages in the mail, always
by special delivery; fish and oysters packed
in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every leaf
carefully washed. Knowing that he must walk 3 miles to mail these,
and knowing how little money he had made the
gifts doubly precious.
When I received these little remembrances, I often
thought of a comment our next-door neighbor
made after he left that first morning.
"Did you keep that awful looking man last
night? I turned him away! You can
lose roomers by putting up such people!"
Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice. But,
oh!, if only they could have known him,
perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear.
I know our family always will be grateful to have
known him; from him we learned what it was
to accept the bad without complaint and the good with
gratitude to God.
Recently I was visiting a friend, who has a
greenhouse, as she showed me her flowers, we
came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden chrysanthemum,
bursting with blooms. But to my great surprise, it was growing in an old dented, rusty bucket. I
thought to myself, "If this were my
plant, I'd put it in the loveliest container I had!"
My friend changed my mind. "I ran short of
pots," she explained, "and knowing
how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn't mind starting out in this old pail. It's just for a
little while, till I can put it out in the
garden."
She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly,
but I was imagining just such a scene in heaven.
"Here's an especially beautiful one," God
might have said when he came to the soul of
the sweet old fisherman. "He won't mind starting in this small body."
All this happened long ago - and now, in God's
garden, how tall this lovely soul must stand.
The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the
outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart." (1 Samuel 16:7b)
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