The Rest of the Story

          The email came while I was visiting family and friends in Washington:  would I preach on August 10?  At first I thought no, and then I reconsidered and said yes.  At Whidbey Presbyterian Church on July 20, I mentioned the request to my former pastor.  His immediate response, given with a smile, was “what’s your topic?”  I didn’t know.

          Returning home to a whirlwind of activity, I still didn’t know.  Should I pull an old sermon from my files and rework it?  The question nagged at the back of my mind, and I started praying about it:  “God, what do You want me to talk about?” 

          Listening to the sermon at Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church on the 27th, I started to get an answer.  Jonah’s unforgiving attitude toward the Ninevites caught my attention.  It reminded me of a novel I had finished reading the day before.  In part, the story was about a character’s anger and bitterness concerning an injustice done to him.  He was stuck in past pain because he refused to forgive.   Hmmm.

I love a good story.  I’ve learned over the years that my seemingly random choice of reading materials often becomes an avenue for God to communicate timely truths to me.  So I should not have been surprised when I started to read the second library book I had checked out the week before:  it, too, contained a subtext concerning unforgiveness.

Okay, so there was the topic, delivered to me via sermon, a Cape Light novel, and a Terri Blackstock mystery.  The next step was easy:  look in the topical files I started to keep close to twenty years ago and see what there was in the forgiveness folder.  I found plenty of notes from various books.

I kept praying and pondering, chose a scripture text, and then started writing.  Draft one was followed by revision one a couple days later.  On August 4, I checked the Whidbey Presbyterian Church website as I do most Mondays and saw that the pastor’s sermon was up from the day before.  To my surprise, his text was Matthew 18: 21-35, the same text I had chosen.  Sure enough, listening to that sermon gave me just the insight I didn’t know I needed for the first part of my sermon.

All that remains now (today is August 7) is to preach it.  No matter how well or how poorly that goes, I am deeply grateful that God spoke to me through two sermons and two novels to identify and confirm a message that we all need to hear:  God forgives and so must we.