The Fisherman
This should make us all very thankful and accepting of others.
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 eight-year-old," I thought as I stared at
the stooped, shriveled body. But 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 long time to
see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body.
He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five
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 prefaced 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 seven 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 three 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 illness' 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)
** If this has blessed you, PLEASE PASS IT ON ***