June 30, 2018 - I was sitting in the car while Pam shopped at “The Stage” in Nacogdoches yesterday when I got a call from my son Mark (my son that lost an eye and leg in an auto accident five years ago.) He began his call as he always does: “What y’all doing?” When I told him we were in Nacogdoches, he replied, “I am, too. I’m on my way home to Tenaha and want to tell you what happened at The Eye Clinic today.”
Mark said the waiting room was packed when he hobbled in for his eye appointment. “I found a place to sit at the front and was able to see down the hall where we went when our name was called.” He had just sat down when a lady came down the hall in “one of those high-dollar motorized wheel chairs”. “She was bent over and her face and actions revealed she could neither talk nor see well. She stopped a few feet from me…with a frightened look in her eyes …as if she was trying to speak.”
About that time a young black man, probably a nurse’s aid, walked up and stood right in front of her. “He had a small plastic toy guitar in his hand that had only one string on it. He started strumming on that one string…ping…ping…ping…” As he continued playing, the woman’s frightened face slowly changed to a faint smile. And as the man “pinged”, the lady began softly…but distinctly singing:
Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me
I once was kost but now I’m found-‘twas blind but now I see.
“I felt tears rolling down my face but was afraid to look at the patients behind me. I didn’t know if they felt what I did”, Mark said. “But when I turned my “good eye” around to see them, every one of them was crying, too”. When Pam came back to the car, and I told her Mark’s story, she responded just like Mark and I did.
And as we pulled into a gas station for gas, Pam did her usual thing of stepping out, inserting the credit card, and turning on the pump. I did my usual thing of huffing and puffing to open my door and walking back to pump the gas. When I got back in the car, I told Pam, “The strangest thing just happened to me.” “I filled the tank up and don’t even remember getting out of the car.” “I know why”, Pam replied. “Your heart was so filled with Mark’s story that you weren’t just pumping gas….
…you were praising God.”
