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 for a few minutes.� It didn't a take 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.

�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.

During 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 with 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 will always 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, until I can put it out in the garden."

�She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was imagining 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.
�

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