Mom’s Chicken Soup Coupled with Forgiveness Wins Over Disgruntled Church Member
A lady tells as story that is a real picture of forgiveness. She says my mom, now in heaven, was a good cook. She was a good forgiver too and the combination of these two qualities resulted one day in an incident I love to recall. Let me recount it to you as I have heard it from a young child. Dad was a preacher, and that made Mom the preacher’s wife an adventurous position to be sure. One day, a wife, who was jealous of her handsome, elderly husband, accused my innocent, young Mom of trying to "steal" him! The lady refused to attend church. My mom felt badly for the poor man, who, in tears, pled with her to talk to his wife. It resulted in a very funny scene, so I am told, of my mom, the dramatist of all time, visiting this lady, kneeling in front of her. With wide-eyed emotion, she "confessed" to the non-crime, "Dear Sister, if you think I am guilty of wanting your husband and before God, I do not then please forgive me; please come back to church." The lady accepted the "apology," returned to church, and continued to be the usual disgruntled church member. She criticized the pastor’s wife for wearing the same dress every Sunday (Mom and Dad were POOR preachers). Then when Mom finally could afford a few new clothes, she criticized her for wearing a different dress every Sunday! You could not please this woman! One day this unhappy, insecure woman became ill. Mom’s reaction? She prepared some delicious homemade chicken soup for the dear lady, and took it to the hospital. The lady saw her preacher’s wife enter the room, with the delicious soup and that did it. She broke down, cried, apologized, and was the sweetest, saintliest friend of the pastor’s wife the rest of her days! And that’s the kind of forgiveness that was modeled in this preacher kid’s home! I saw it, fleshed out in real-life incidents, time after time, in the lives of both parents but none hardly as comical as the story of the chicken soup! So what’s the point? Climb out of your well today, smell the chicken soup cooking on Mom’s old fashioned stove of forgiveness, and come with me. For you see, forgiveness is JUST like my mom’s chicken soup!
From a sermon by Dennis Selfridge, Joseph the forgiver, 3/3/2010