"Appointments............................"

A weekend excursion to Charleston, attending the wedding of a nephew whom I’ve seen no more than twice in the last twenty years, has left me filled with thankfulness for how God’s grace spills over in our life in more ways than one. Two encounters made while exploring the area downtown a bit Saturday morning stayed with me. Near a fountain with multiple cascades in a park just off the beach, stood a Jehovah’s Witness couple, one on either side of a large display of publications and tracts regarding their faith, both with arms folded across their chests, looking as if they had no heart, nor indeed any interest at all in someone possibly starting a conversation with them. Then, a few blocks further into the city’s depths, we walked through a graveyard attached to a Unitarian assembly that, for whatever reason, had completely neglected any and all care of it. Whoever was buried there had long ago been forgotten, erased from all memory by time and nature’s onslaught. Two different scenarios all together, the “evangelists” and the deceased; but they reflect well on my visit, gathered there in a hotel with my oldest daughter and her husband, along with my sister and her whole family. It was the son of my deceased brother getting married at the age of 52, the two of us meeting for possibly only the third time in his life, fraternal careers in the Navy having taken his father and me in different directions. I hardly know him and his sister. Somehow, though, when they announced the bride and groom as “Mr. and Mrs. John Filer”, it was as if Wayne was there with us, pleased that we had made the trip. Moreover, it was as if the Holy Ghost parted the waters, opportunity opened for an hour of conversation with my sister’s son Saturday morning in the lobby, more with his daughter driving back after the ceremony that evening. The three women, three generations with the youngest noticeably carrying the next addition in her womb, were part of an “anointing” that seemed to be, not “creating” bonds, but surely strengthening that which was previously known. We “connected”. For only the second occasion in thirteen years, my scheduled visit to the Youth Detention Center was trusted to a friend Sunday morning. I hated missing. Yet it seems as if divine intervention had something else in mind, these past three days special to me. Good to be back; but glad we went……