THE OLD FISHERMAN  

  Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of 
 Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented
 the upstairs rooms to out patients at the clinic.

 One summer evening
 as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to
 see a truly awful looking man.  "Why, he's hardly taller than my
 eight-year-old," I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body.
 But the appalling thing was his face-lopsided from swelling, red and
raw.

Yet his voice was pleasant
 as he said, "Good evening. I've come to see if you've a room for just
 one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore,
 and there's no bus 'til morning."

 He told me he'd been hunting for a room since noon but with no
 success, no one seemed to have a room. "I guess it's my face...I know
 it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments..."

 For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: "I could
 sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the
 morning." I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the
 porch. I went inside and finished getting supper. When we were ready,
 I asked the old man if he would join us. "No thank you. I have
 plenty."

 And he held up a brown paper bag. When I had finished the dishes, I
 went out on the porch to talk with him a few minutes. It didn't take a
 long time to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into
 that tiny body.  He told me he fished for a living to support his
 daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was hopelessly
 crippled from a back injury.  He didn't tell it by way of complaint;
 in fact, every other sentence was preface with a thanks to God for a
 blessing.

 He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was
 apparently a form of skin cancer. He thanked God for giving him the
 strength to keep going.  At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the
 children's room for him. When I got up in the morning, the bed linens
 were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch. He refused
 breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as if
 asking a great favor, he said, "Could I please come back and stay the
 next time I have a treatment? I won't put you out a bit. I can sleep
 fine in a chair."

 He paused a moment and then added, "Your children made me feel at
 home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don't seem to
 mind." I told him he was welcome to come again. And on his next trip
 he arrived a little after seven in the morning. As a gift, he
 brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen.

 He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they'd
 be nice and fresh. I knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m. and I wondered
 what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.

 In the years he came to stay overnight with us there was never a time
 that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his
 garden. Other times we received packages in the mail, always by
 special delivery; fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young
 spinach or kale, every leaf carefully washed. Knowing that he must
 walk three miles to mail these, and knowing how little money he had
 made the gifts doubly precious. When I received these little
 remembrances, I often thought of a comment our next-door neighbor made
 after he left that first morning.

 "Did you keep that awful looking man last night?  I turned him away!
 You can lose roomers by putting up such people!" Maybe we did lose
 roomers once or twice. But oh! If only they could have known him,
 perhaps their illness' would have been easier to bear. I know our
 family always will be grateful to have known him; from him we learned
 what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with
 gratitude to God.

 Recently I was visiting a friend who has a greenhouse, As she showed
 me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden
 chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms. But to my great surprise, it was
 growing in an old dented, rusty bucket. I thought to myself, "If this
 were my plant, I'd put it in the loveliest container I had!"

 My friend changed my mind. "I ran short of pots," she explained, "and
 knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn't mind
 starting out in this old pail. It's just for a little while, till I
 can put it out in the garden."

 She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was
 imagining just such a scene in heaven. "Here's an especially beautiful
 one," God might have said when he came to the soul of the sweet old
 fisherman.  "He won't mind starting in this small body."  All this
 happened long ago-and now, in God's garden, how tall this lovely soul
 must stand.

 The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the
 outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart." (1 Samuel 16:7b)

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