Day 061x: A most Holy Holdover … (06/14/2019)
It started to rain more heavily as I left the chateau-wedding behind and entered the city proper, and yet St. Etienne, the catholic church located in Beduer’s initial town square, was locked up tight for the night and thus provided no shelter from the steadily falling showers … 🙁
Fortunately, however, the town’s tourist information office was located directly across that same village square. Even more fortunately, on-hand employee Alice (pictured at her desk below) was amazed by my Walk and — even though the tourist office was just minutes away from closing — set about making call after call to try and find me a place to spend the night … 🙂
And this was no easy task for her, as Beduer not only had a dearth of public parks & benches to offer, but it turned out that the church (the most likely place of refuge) was not only closed for the night but closed completely to the public for major renovations that were taking place inside … :O
Indeed, things were looking pretty grim for yours truly when Alice decided to call Nadine — the local town matriarch who was in charge of the church’s administration and upkeep. Nadine came to the tourist office right away*, heard about both my Walk & my predicament, and without hesitation told the officials there that I would be allowed to stay the night in the church — and not only that, but also that I would even be given the keys to the same, so that I could keep its doors locked while simultaneously able to come & go if the need arose … :O
“Some people believe that happiness means refusing to tolerate anyone who makes you nervous or feel in any way ‘less than.’ Of course, the truest bellwether of Right Action — namely, the selfless Way of Christ, demands exactly the opposite. Indeed, it is Jesus himself who essentially tells us all to get off our self-righteous butts and reach out to life’s most difficult people in the middle of life’s most difficult moments. Indeed, his ministry wasn’t in any way about a bunch of like-minded people getting together once a week to sing hymns while receiving a non-binding feel-good message that they may or may not apply in their lives, depending on the depth of their fear or anger. No, the message of Christ is and always has been about caring for and helping the downtrodden — the poor, the wanderers, the hurt, and the homeless; the difficult, the scary, the repulsive, and even the wicked. It is about turning the other cheek when someone hurts you. It is about ‘making amends’ even before any wrong has been committed. It is about reaching out to strangers with acts of reckless kindness. In truth it is about Loving others over & over & over again, and giving them as many chances as they need to respond affirmatively thereto … And it is only when we do this that we can come anywhere close to actually knowing Christ — and it is only when you truly know Christ that we will ever know real Peace and true Joy. Until then, we will never know who Jesus was or what he meant or why he lived the way he lived. Untie l we do so we will ever remain mere Sunday-only shoe-lickers. Until we choose to make Love our way of life, we will continue to boom our vapid selfishness to the world, and the world will reverberate the same to us in return. So choose wisely, my dear ones — Choose to LOVE.” ~ inspired by Shannon L. Alder
;