Sunday, May 4, 2008

No Ordinary Life


Last week Valerie and I drove all the way across Oregon and Idaho to visit Bruce and Flo Walters. It's 720 miles from Boring to Rigby, a very short distance to honor two extraordinary servants.

The neighbors probably wouldn't use that adjective to describe Bruce and Flo. After all, they live in a nice but non-descript double-wide manufactured home on an treeless street and drive an old Toyota sedan. They wear every day clothes and eat every day food because they are every day people. But if the neighbors could see them through the lens of the Kingdom of God they would never call them ordinary.

Bruce and Flo raised their family in Idaho before going to Alaska to settle into a small community 330 crow-flight miles from the nearest road. They went simply to offer their lives to people.

When they arrived, they were given a house to rent. Flo, like any nester, wanted to start by cleaning it up, but Bruce said Let's wait for a couple of days. Dust flying out an open front door at the end of a broom would say "This house is dirty" and he didn't want to offend the community.

Of course a little dust was nothing new to Bruce, or his bride. He was an Idaho sheepherder. He grew up in the hills and benches above the Snake River and, like a certain king-to-be of Israel, lived most of his life with sheep. Like that Israeli shepherd, he killed a bear that was raiding his flock, and the .22 pistol he used to do it was more powerful than a sling only by degrees.

That had been their life, but God called them like he called Amos, from tending sheep to offering a life to people. And they went. And they served that little community, and two or three others, through 13 years of obscurity in Alaska's desolate wilderness. The gift of their lives brought help and love and grace to some very dear people, dear to the Walters and dear to Jesus Christ.

Now they are back in Idaho in retirement. The living room of that little manufactured home displays a simple wooden plaque expressing the love of those remote Alaska communities.

Bruce and Flo still live pretty much in obscurity. But they have many friends in many places, whose embrace now is all the more dear to them since they found out, about a month ago, that Flo has stage 4 cancer.

None of us knows our days. Only to God is the future clear. That's how it works: He knows and loves, we trust and obey. That He would stoop to work with people at all is something very profound. But He does. He uses the most ordinary people.

He used Hannah, the barren wife of a polygamist, to provide the priest Samuel who rescued his people from moral collapse and became one of the most prominent leaders in the history of Israel.

He used Simon of Cyrene ... and went out of his way to identify him ... to carry the cross upon which Jesus of Nazereth died to purchase salvation for the world.

He used the youngest son of Jesse, a redhead despised by six older brothers, to kill a giant and deliver his people and become their greatest king, the benchmark for all the long line of royalty. He was a shepherd, like Bruce and Flo. About him the scriptures testify that "David ... served the purpose of God in his own generation ..."

That's how God works. And because he does, in the economy of God, there is no such thing as an ordinary life.

And as Bruce and Flo would be the first to say, it isn't about us anyway ... it's about the King.

We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.

2 comments:

Keith and Lisa Strasser said...

Gary,

Interesting story. I enjoyed reading it, and the others. Though I am not sure what to think of your comments about Omaha in the first entry.

Keep up the nice work on this blog.

Keith S. Omaha

Joe said...

Thanks for including this on your blog. Bruce and Flo are amazing people - in their choices to put Christ first in their lives, and maintain a simple life that they share with others out of a genuine, Christ-centered, love and care for them. As the seasons of life are changing for Bruce and Flo, may God bless them with peace and strength in and through this latest trial, as He brings His chosen ones into their lives to minister to them as the extension of Christ's love and compassion in action.