Jonathan and I sat at an old wooden table sipping water or chamomile tea at the home of precious friends in Colorado Springs the nights after Jonathan's brother's viewing/visitation and the memorial service. Gordon is a cancer survivor, Iraq vet, and song leader at our old church. Sophie, his wife, is from the Netherlands and I just love her accent and the way she talks.
She is an avid quilter and loves handwork--like this below, from England.
She sat at the table stitching furiously and showing me how she does the stitches.
I also loved this framed Dutch alphabet (below) in the basement near the room we stayed in. I am always fascinated by other alphabets and cultures.
But anyway, as we were sitting at the table that evening, Jonathan mentioned about how he was going to be trying to level and stabilize a travel trailer for his brother's widow on Saturday. And in the blink of an eye, Gordon pointed out the sliding glass door.
"We've had pavers sitting there for twenty years," he said. "Take as many as you want."
And at the drop of a hat, God provided pavers we would have had to purchase!
Saturday morning Gordon and I helped Jonathan carry pavers from the pallet on the hill in the back yard to stack in the back of our Honda.
Gordon was puffing, and I was only able to carry one paver at a time.
Our weaknesses were rather disgusting as we watched Jonathan haul three or four at once down the piney hill.
"Doesn't that just make you sick?" I said to Gordon, as we stood there watching my husband (chronic pain and all) carrying four pavers almost but not quite effortlessly down the hill.
Jonathan has spent his life completely unable to keep up with the mountain hiking and biking that his brother Rob has done--hundreds of mountains climbed, thousands of miles biked. Jonathan's asthma as well as his ankle, injured more than once in falls from scaffold early in life, has kept him from participating in strenuous hikes and mountain biking. So he would look with complete awe at what his brother could do, while we, even weaker, would watch with complete awe at what he could do.
Like the way he knows how to operate the jacks under most any travel trailer, and how he can walk away from the trailer, eyeball it, and get it almost perfectly level in the absence of any levelers on the old trailer.
It was all I could do to carry one paver at a time to the several different spots by the trailer where they needed to be.
I also had no idea how to fix a faucet that had to be turned on with pliers. Jonathan took a look, took a closer look, and decided that for a temporary fix, a Y split would take care of the situation so a hose could be connected for the trailer while the other side of the faucet could be turned on and off--without pliers.
Jonathan also knew what was needed to replace the nonexistent sewer hose/pipe for the trailer. A trip to Lowes while I tried to find something affordable to eat at Safeway nearby resulted in three 10-ft plumbing pipes riding on the back of the Honda seats. I am learning in our trips with our Honda to expect most anything to fit inside between the windshield and the back window!
I am also learning to admire more and more the skills and abilities others have that I don't.
They remind me of God, Who gave the skills and abilities, and of His immeasurable strength, grace, and power to accomplish so many things we can't possibly do in our own strength.
Jonathan can only take short hikes and short bike rides and do a few little things for a sorrowing sister-in-law in a very short time that we are still in Colorado.
I can only carry one big brick paver at a time.
But God carries us all--the grieving family, the contractor suffering chronic pain, and the little lady fighting cancer and chemo effects.
"I am strong when I am on His shoulder," the song says,
"He'll raise me up to more than I can be."
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