A Story from Chuck

Our speaker this morning at the Adventureland Chapel was Chuck Strittmather, a former pastor, now with the Navigators. Chuck is an anointed and very dedicated man of God and a very apt teacher of the scriptures. He is also a great storyteller. Chuck will be forever famous among those of us at the Adventureland congregation for his story about the mule and the line in that story that said "shake it off; step on it. . . ." I’ll share that one with you on another occasion, but I feel compelled by the Spirit to share with you the story that he told at the end of his message this morning.

The story takes place in England during the time of the Second World War. England had been ravaged by bombs and missiles during that war, as I’m sure many already know. Food rationing was a daily reality for the English, leaving many to get by on much less than they would have liked.

A little boy was walking down the street one day and passed a bakery. He stopped to look in the window. An American soldier walked up beside him.

"Sure smells good, doesn’t it" said the G.I. to the boy.

"Yes, it sure does!" he replied.

"It really looks good too!" the soldier said, to which the youngster replied again in the affirmative. The soldier then invited the boy to go with him inside the bakery. He told the little guy to pick out anything he wanted, and after much deliberation the lad picked out two rolls. The American soldier, of course paid the tab.

The young boy then thanked the soldier enthusiastically and ran off. Moments later he returned to the G.I., still enjoying the rolls the soldier had bought him and said:

"Can I ask you a question sir?"

"What’s that?" said the G.I.

"Are you God?"

The moral to the story is, of course, that this simple act of kindness was probably no big thing to an American soldier. They were notorious for the fact that they had an abundance of money in their pockets, and were always doing things like this for children that they encountered in Europe. But to a small, hungry English boy, who had gone without such pleasures as long as he could remember, this simple act of kindness was what he might expect from no less than God Himself!

The American G.I. was, of course, not God, but in this case had been His representative. Let us all look for these small (or maybe not so small) things that we can do so we too can be His representatives, the Body of Christ, in this world.

Thanks for spending this moment with me today.