“That lovely, lovely man”

There is a lady who belongs to the church which I serve. She cannot leave her home at present because of her physical condition, itself substantially the result of a botched operation several years ago. She has been close to death on several occasions. Although she often grieves over her pain, and has often expressed a desire to be free from it, her great complaint and most often-expressed desire are that she might be able to gather with God’s people on the Lord’s day to worship him.

When I go to see her, she often looks pale and drawn. I take her CDs of the sermons, and she listens to them and then sends them on to others so that they can also enjoy the ministry. She tells me that all she really has opportunity to do is to read and to pray. She is not a well-educated woman, and often excuses her lack of learning, but her Bible, she says, is a “Godsend” (I smile when she says this kind of thing, because she has little idea how full and accurate is her speech). She loves her Bible. She particularly loves Romans 8, Proverbs 3, and Isaiah 53. She loves to read the Gospels, and she talks about “that lovely, lovely man” of whom she reads, and how he lived and suffered and died for her, and her eyes fill with tears as she talks about how her eyes fill with tears whenever she thinks of how they hated, and spat at, and slaughtered “that lovely, lovely man.” You see, she knows him. Sometimes I almost think she sees him. She talks to him and walks with him. She loves him absolutely, personally, really. To her, Jesus of Nazareth is not a collection of doctrines, not a list of facts, not a remnant of history, but the God-man who loved her and laid down his life to save her from her sins before rising again from the dead, and who now lives and reigns and cares for her and all his flock.

And, as ever, I read and I pray and I leave, feeling very inadequate to minister to a woman whose personal devotion to the Lord Christ puts mine so much in the shade.