Good Marriage Samaritan

Here is an excerpt from a recent ladies ministry event that I spoke at.

I've learned first hand how God can use people to touch lives. Here is the story of two people.  I call this the story of the Good Marriage Samaritan. Vera* was one of the very first friends that my mother made when she emigrated to the United States from Europe as a young child. After my mother passed away, Vera was like a second mother to me. As time went by, we grew very close. I visited her and made sure to phone her regularly. She had given up driving, so I made an effort to take her food shopping from time to time and drive her places that she needed to go. We enjoyed craft projects and doing puzzles together. She was much better at them than I was.

One day, on one such visit, we were clipping coupons in her living room. (Vera was a prodigious coupon collector and practically spent nothing on her grocery bill). Anyway, it seemed quite out of the blue when she told me that she had something on her mind that she needed to talk to me about. Something that had bothered her for a long time. She told me that when she and my mother were young, that my mother had came to her seeking marital advise on a number of occasions. Vera told me that although she had attended church and knew that she should help people in need, that she completely failed to give my mother any piece of helpful advise.

Furthermore, she told me that she resented my mother even calling her about this when she had been so busy with her own life. After all, Vera reminded me, that at the time she had a job, and six children to raise. So, she reasoned, she had no time for my mother's problems. At that time in her life, she thought that going to church regularly and occasionally helping at church events was all that was required, but now, she thought better of that. She now believed she might have made a difference in the life of my family. Vera wanted my forgiveness. I readily gave her that forgiveness, even as I struggled with the meaning of it all. I wondered why so many Christians failed to have true charity in their hearts at moments like this. I wondered why we have such superficial relationships and fail to truly make a difference for Christ.

Then, there was Dan*. Dan was a partner in an antique business close to a popular Christian retreat center in New Jersey. He was a divorced father of two and former police officer.  Dan saw his marriage fail as the pressures of his law enforcement career mounted. It was after that divorce, in the process of picking up the pieces of his broken life that he became a Christian. His whole life changed as he started to study the Bible and begin to see what God's plan for his life had been. He started to come to terms with his failure to be a godly husband and how those mistakes had cost him his marriage. Out of this, grew a personal crusade to share the message of godly marriages and to help those struggling in this area. He quickly became an expert on everything the Bible had to say about marriage and shared it with everyone who came into his antique store.

The summer that I met Dan, I had rented a house in the vicinity so that my family and I could immerse ourselves in various Christian activities.  My teenage daughter's rebellion had taken a toll on our family and especially my marriage.  God must have used my love of antiques to bring me together with Dan. In the most godly way imaginable, as I went to pay for my purchases, Dan offered me a free CD set that he had made about what the Bible said about marriage. "Would you like me to put that in your bag Ma'am?" At that moment, I felt like I was in some sort of alternative universe! "Yes," I said. Just when I needed help the most, someone reached out to me.  He helped save my marriage.

Who do you think is the Good Marriage Samaritan? 







*the names are changed, the stories are not.