As it turned out, Arlie and Dick had incredible stories to tell. I was a happy listener, of course, because they were genuinely interesting storytellers-and because they were delightful surrogate grandfathers to our four-year-old daughter. The way to a father's heart is through his children...
Arlie was first. "My uncle," he said with a twinkle in his eye, "ended the plague in the Philippines and pitched in major league baseball. Not only that," he continued, "but he was a war hero, too!"
Arlie wasn't given to boasting or exaggeration, so I figured there had to be some basis for his story. I waited for him to tell me more, settling into what I suspected was going to be a long tale. "That's all I know," he said. While I was very curious, Arlie hadn't ever researched or learned more; the headlines were enough for him.
Even later, after I uncovered the full story of his uncle's life-replete with more twists and turns than a Hollywood movie and more compelling and heroic than it sounded that night-Arlie was content. He knew enough to treasure what he knew, and to treasure his uncle's memory.
Amazed at what I'd discovered while researching Arlie's story, I told it to Dick, who I felt certain would be just as intrigued. Like Arlie, Dick was also in his 80s, also a terrific storyteller, and also paid particular attention to accuracy in telling his tales.
"Well, if you like that story, then you'll love this one," Dick said. "One of my friends from here in Rutland disappeared early in WWII, and was listed as 'missing and presumed dead' in the telegram his parents received from the government." With that statement, Dick got up from the rocking chair on his porch and went into the back door of his house. Returning in a minute or so with yellowed news clippings, he waved them at me. "These are just in case you wondered if I was spinning a tall tale." He set them on the table and waited to see if I checked up on him. "I don't need those; you tell me," I said.
"Anyway," Dick said, pleased I took his word for it, "the war went on and so did I, getting into the thing myself as a soldier. One day near the end, we were in Europe, and I was one of the first guys through the doors of this big POW camp. We were tired and pretty leery, because we weren't sure what we were going to find in there."
He paused, his voice choked with emotion as he re-lived the moment in the telling: "Would you believe it? Standing right there in front of me when we pushed the gate open was this friend of mine from Rutland! All those years we thought he was dead-I know his mother thought he was dead-and there he was right there in front of me! Boy that was something!"
Dick paused to collect himself, and it was obvious he was in Germany again, seeing that prison camp gate and seeing his friend right there like a ghost. It took awhile for him to speak. When he did, he added: "What were the chances of that?!?"
Two remarkable stories, played out literally on the other side of the globe decades in the past, both stored in the minds of neighbors fifty yards apart in small town Vermont. Even though Arlie's uncle saved thousands of lives, played major league baseball with seven future Hall of Famers, all while simultaneously befriending most of America's turn-of-the-century sports and political heroes, his story had to be chased to be discovered. Arlie's testimony pointed me to the trail, and I gleefully chased it down. Dick, on the other hand, still felt the moment of reunion as keenly fifty years later as he did that day in 1945, and I knew in an instant of its truth.
So goes our stories of faith, too, both in the telling and the hearing. Some who see us only hear the traces of the tail, but are so intrigued by those traces they watch for other clues or chase eagerly on their own to find the rest of what makes us faithful. Others know us well enough that when we tell our story of faith, or when they see our faith played out in life's harder moments, they immediately know Jesus is the real thing because they can see Him in us.
Never think your life isn't telling the story of your faith, even when it seems no one is being changed by your telling. In heaven, you who strive to live in faithful obedience, even though you falter in the trying, you will surely marvel at the number who will one day tell you they met Jesus when they met you.
Let grace be the theme of your relationship with God, and let it be the story you tell as you live and work.
--Randy Kilgore
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