The lady and the grocer

A local 52-year-old woman we'll call Nancy (I don't know her name) died in a car accident a few weeks ago and my friend Dayle went to the funeral. She noticed in the crowd a man who is the manager of a local supermarket where Dayle shops. He is not a churchgoer.

Dayle wanted to make sure the man did not leave the church without a hospitable greeting, so when she saw him making his way to the exit, she made a beeline to him and said, "Hi, I'm Dayle. From the supermarket." (She wanted to give him some context.) Then she asked him how he knew Nancy. The man replied that Nancy was a customer at the market, and that whenever she came in she used to "say a little something about Jesus."

Dayle and I were both greatly impressed. What a wonderful weave God is able to weave by small, daily acts of faith and faithfulness. Who knows what will become of this man (for whom Dayle is now praying)?

Later I asked myself: What kind of person would you have to be to go around saying "a little something about Jesus" to the manager of your supermarket? The conclusion I came to is that it would be very difficult to suddenly slip into conversation about Jesus with your supermarket manager -or auto mechanic, or hairdresser, or neighbor-unless you were already "in the zone," so to speak. You might try it, of course, out of some sense of Christian duty, but I imagine it would come out rather wooden and unnatural.

No, I suspect this 52-year-old woman whom the Lord saw fit to take home ("Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints"-Psalm 116:15) was always walking around under an open heaven, always talking to the Lord. And so, when she would run into the manager, there was never any abrupt discontinuity between the way she spoke to him and the way she was just speaking a moment ago to herself and to her Lord.