I Am With You Always Series

Chippie the parakeet was sitting on his perch one morning … whistling a happy tune … when his owner decided to clean his cage … [pause] … with a vacuum cleaner. The phone rang and when Chippie’s owner went to answer it … well … that’s when Chippie’s day took a turn for the worse. While his owner was talking on the phone, she wasn’t paying attention to the business end of the vacuum hose and poor Ol’ Chippie got sucked into the vacuum cleaner … thwump!

Realizing what had happened, the woman tore open the dust bag expecting to find Chippie dead. Fortunately, Chippie wasn’t dead … just stunned and covered in dust. His owner stuck him under the faucet in the kitchen to rise him off. Chippie was alive and clean but now he was also cold and wet and shivering … so, his owner decided to dry him off and warm him up at the same time by using her hair dryer.

Poor Chippie! He went from singing on his perch to being sucked up in a vacuum cleaner … nearly drown in the kitchen sink … and blasted in the face with hot air.

A week later a friend of the owner called to ask how Chippie was doing. “Well,” she said, “he’s all right … although he doesn’t sing anymore.”

Have you ever felt like Ol’ Chippie? One minute you’re just going along … singing a song … minding your own business … when … all of a sudden … thwump! You’re sucked up by the trials of life … drowning in a flood of difficulties … and getting blasted in the face by a whirlwind of problems.

Life can sure come at us pretty fast and blind-side us, can’t it? There are times when the trials and troubles of life can suck the very song right out of your heart. Sometimes it seems like the deck is stacked against you or that you can’t get ahead no matter how hard you try, amen?

While serving in Vietnam during the Vietnam conflict, a young American soldier began dating a local Vietnamese woman … and she became pregnant. Right at that time, his tour of duty was over and he got shipped home stateside … never to be seen or heard from again … leaving behind his pregnant Vietnamese girlfriend with a terrible burden to bear. You see, dating a American soldier was bad enough … it brought shame to the family … but to have a half-bred American baby as the result of it … well … they disowned her and kicked her out of the house and she had to fend for herself.

When her baby was born … a girl … it was obvious that the child was of mixed race. She had light skin and wavy light-colored hair … which made her stick out like a sore thumb. Everywhere that she and her mother went, they were treated with scorn … spat upon and driven out by insults and curses. By the time the girl was seven years old, her mother couldn’t take all the rejection and insults any more and abandoned her. This seven-year-old girl did everything that she could to survive in the streets … eating whatever she could find wherever she could find it … her clothes quickly became nothing more than dirty rags … her hair matted and filled with lice … and always the insults and the curses. Everywhere that she went they called her an “ugly alien devil” in Vietnamese. They called her that so much that she came to believe that that who she was … an “ugly alien devil.” Why else would everyone call her that … why else would everyone treat her like that … why else would nobody help her or say a kind word to her unless it were true … that she was indeed an “ugly alien devil”?

Eventually she found her way to an orphanage that was willing to take her in. As you can imagine, an orphanage willing to take in an ugly alien devil wasn’t a very nice place. It was crowded and filthy … but it was better then living out in streets.

What would the Apostle Paul say to this little girl if he met her? He would probably squat down, take her dirty face between his hands, look her in the eyes, and tell her:

“I know that this is going to be impossible for you to understand, Precious One, given all that you’ve been through already, but God loves you, Dear Child! God loves you more than you could possibly imagine. Despite what everyone else is saying to you … God doesn’t see you as an ugly alien devil. He saw you living in the streets and it broke His heart, so He brought you to this place where He has better plans for you. He knows where you are … He knows what you’re going through … and even though you may not believe it, God is taking care of you.”