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MAKING EVERY MOMENT COUNT #5

THE STRANGER IN ROW 28

In a sermon entitled “Pointing to Jesus: Generosity,” the great preacher, Gordon MacDonald, tells a personal story where he and his wife Gail were on an airplane. Now, all Pastor MacDonald wanted was a nice, quiet flight home . . . and he even kind of prayed that God would give him that small favor.

Well, he began to worry when two ladies and two small kids came down the aisle.  Oh boy, he thought.  Two moms and two monsters; here we go.  One lady took the window seat, the other the aisle seat, with one kid in the middle, and the other on a lap.  And wouldn’t you know it, the flight was a turbulent, miserable mess.  The kids’ ears hurt; they cried like a couple of demons, and the trip was just disastrous for everyone.  The woman sitting by the window did all she could to comfort the child in the middle, but it wasn’t helping much.  And MacDonald was thinking to himself: Boy, these women get a medal for what they are doing.  But hold off on the applause, because all at once, the child in the middle seat got sick.  Actually, worse than sick.  She just literally exploded — how shall we say it? — from both ends.  The diaper she was wearing didn’t fit too good, and things were just plain lousy there in seat 28B.  Lousy on the seat, lousy on the floor, and the stench was enough to knock a 747 out of the sky.

Well, this woman next to the window very quietly, very patiently tried to comfort the child.  Trying to wipe everything up, saying over and over, “It’s okay, honey.  It’s okay.”  Etc.

They finally landed, and boy, everyone on board was ready to deplane out the front door, out the emergency exits, out the window, anything.  Gordon and his wife were stuck in the back, of course, and they watched as a flight attendant came up with some paper towels, and gave them to the woman sitting by the window.  “Here, ma’am,” they said.  “These are for your little girl.”

Now friend, hold on to your seatbelt.  The woman took the towels, but said in reply: “This isn’t my little girl.”  “Aren’t you traveling together?”  And the lady said, making no big deal about it, “No, I’ve never met this woman and these children before in my life.”

And Gordon MacDonald was just pinned to the wall.  He was blown away . . . as I am blown away by a story like that.  He concludes his sermon by saying:

“Suddenly, I realized I had just seen mercy lived out.  A lot of us would have just died in this circumstance.  This woman found the opportunity to give mercy.  She was, in the words of Christ, ‘The person who was the neighbor.’”

Well, that’s our Friday story.  This weekend, as we’re all making New Year’s resolutions, I guess this anonymous woman on the plane has put the high bar pretty high.

But let me make two points.  First of all, we’ve been thinking together all this week about the effect of the small nudges we give each other in life.  The quiet word of friendship, the cup of cold water, the hug in a moment of crisis.  Here this nameless heroine on the plane reaches out in an act of service.  She helps a struggling mother.  She gives tenderness to a hurting child.  Now, nobody knows her name.  Reporters didn’t take her picture.  But who can measure what that one act of generosity has meant to that mother ever since?  How has the compound interest of her good deed built up?  No one will ever know.

And we notice here that this story was put into Leadership magazine, where it has been read by tens of thousands of pastors and Christian leaders.  How many of them put it in their pulpit sermons the following weekend?  I’ve told it here on the radio, and how many other media ministries have perhaps done the same?  You might shut off the radio five minutes from now and tell that same marvelous story to five of your friends at work.  Friend, even when you get out a Handi-Wipes on an airplane, you just do not know how the Lord is going to multiply your effectiveness.

But I’d like to invite you to think back with me to an earlier time in the life of that stranger on the airplane.  How many years back, I don’t know.  But think about it — all of us in life, slowly and imperceptibly, but surely, turn into people who either help someone else on a plane . . . or turn away.  We assist with luggage, or just grab our own.  We say a word of comfort, or bury our noses in Hemisphere magazine.

Somewhere in this woman’s past, she made small choices that set her on the road toward that encounter in Row 28.  When faced with the chance to do good, or to do nothing, she did good.  Then again later.  And again.  And again.  Finally it got to be such a pattern that it defined her.  She didn’t sit by that window and think: “Should I?  Shouldn’t I?  Help or ignore?  Yes or no?”  Small decisions from before, in her past, perhaps inspired by an explicit belief in the life example of Jesus Christ, or perhaps just imprinted in her life by the invisible working of the Holy Spirit . . . made her kind when this focal moment came to her.

Maybe you’ve read the old story about the elephants in the circus.  Bobb Biehl, in his book, Masterplanning, shares the tale, how he asked a Hollywood animal trainer: “How is it that you can stake down a ten-ton elephant with the same size stake that you use for this little fellow?”  And he pointed to a baby elephant who weighed a scant 300 pounds.

And the trainer laughed.  “It’s easy,” he said.  “When they are babies, we stake them down.  They try to tug away from the stake maybe ten thousand times before they realize that they can’t possibly get away.  At that point, their ‘elephant memory’ takes over and they remember for the rest of their lives that they can’t get away from the stake.’”

And that huge, ten-ton elephant, all 20,000 pounds of pure animal muscle . . . is locked in place by a tiny piece of wood.  Friend, that’s the scary side, the negative side, of the power of reinforcement.  You talk about nudges and the ripple effect and compound interest!

Of course, for the people of God, we want the same principle to work exactly in reverse.  To say, early in life, when small opportunities come along: “Yes, I can.  Yes, I should.  And by the grace and power of God, yes, I will.”

We’ve told and retold, here on the Voice of Prophecy, the twin Bible stories of Daniel and Joseph.  Some of you remember our series, A Kid Named Joe.  And we don’t know the whole “back story,” as they call it, of these two heroes.  What was it in their childhoods, in their upbringing, that turned them emphatically in the direction of faithfulness to God?  Men like Noah and David and Abraham and Samson — valiant men who did great things for God — all have their failures recorded in the pages of Scripture.  But with Daniel, nothing!  Certainly he was a sinner like the rest of us, but there’s not a single recorded moment of failure, of turning away from God.  In fact, even his name, “Daniel,” means “God Is My Judge.”  In Daniel chapter one it says, “He purposed in his heart” to be obedient to his Judge.    Daniel two, with the story of the king’s mysterious dream — same thing.  And in story after story, right on through to chapter 12, we find Daniel and God in close communion.  Some small decisions in the life of a young Hebrew kid, “Danny Boy,” piled one on top of another, until this young man was just a rock.  We don’t know what they were; we don’t know the details.  Good deeds quietly performed, like the kindness of that anonymous lady on the plane.  Acts of obedience “known but to God.”

Well, friend, that’s where we are here on the eve of a new year.  And the good news is that, even if you’ve celebrated on many New Year’s Eves already, it’s never too late to start investing in righteousness.  It’s not too late to become a quiet force for goodness in your neighborhood, nudging your neighbors and your friends toward the kingdom of God.  They don’t have to be huge shoves, overwhelming doctrinal blasts . . . even just tiny ripples of love will do.  Probably no one will write up what you do in a big Christian magazine, but God will know.  He’ll take it upon Himself to turn your ripples into tidal waves. That’s the beautiful thing about compound interest, friend.  It starts accruing the moment you make the deposit.

And in your own life too.  And mine.  I’m in my 54^th year of life already, and yet God calls me, here on the 29^th of December, 2000, to make every inward decision, every act of conscience one that will place me, and keep me, on the narrow road Jesus described in Matthew chapter seven, the road that leads to life.