Day by day at a beautiful, local nursing home for blind and weak-sighted people, I fellowshipped with Inger (88), my widow friend, an honest, spiritually hungry child of God, always asking a lot of good questions.  The answers we “listened to” from the word of God often called forth a beautiful smile on her countenance coming from an unseen, but real world, God´s world full of redeemed smiles.

Last Friday evening I said to her, “Inger, I´ve been the one who has been teaching and expounding from the word of God to you all the time.  Today I must confide in you about my own weaknesses and ask you to pray for me.”  And Inger prayed so fervently as I´d never heard her pray before, and then we parted after having sung a hymn.  Saturday afternoon I called on the nursing home again.  I wanted to tell her how I´d appreciated her prayer for me the day before, but she was not there.  At her bed in the local hospital were sitting her loved ones.  Inger was in deep coma and quietly went to be with the Lord, in His presence, the same Saturday night.

Whenever I read the Philippians and Colossians from now on, my thoughts will be with Inger as these were the last New Testament epistles we studied together and from which we gleaned so much.  Of course we also talked about the Christ-filled eternity and the assurance of being with the Lord in full and blessed consciousness when “absent from the body”  (2 Cor. 5:8).  A wonderful truth to dwell on, though I now feel strangely poor without her.

Count it a great privilege, my friend, to sit down with a lonely fellow believer, maybe at a nursing home or elsewhere, to share with one another the things of the Lord.  The church as such with all her many busy programs has often little time for that.  However, don´t miss it.

-jn-

June 22, 2010