The following is an essay written by a mission trip participant from last summer.  God does amazing things…

I sat, staring glassy-eyed at the floor, wondering why I was there.  It was high summer, and the heat was still on.  As the sweat beaded on my forehead, I listened to some old guy, Elmer, drone on about gardening and knitting and other topics of little interest to me.  Paying no attention, I lifted my gaze from the carpeted floor to the walker, to the therapeutic compression socks, to the grey shorts and shirt, and finally, to the big glasses that obscured his face—definitely not someone I cared to know.  He and I were two people from different places and different generations, with absolutely no need to meet or know of each other’s existence.  In the reflection of his glasses, I saw the not so subtle boredom of my countenance mirrored back at me.

I was stuck in an assisted living home, in The Middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania, in the middle of a church mission trip, in the middle of summer.  Elmer’s needles clicked together as he knit.

“I make Christmas stockings for each baby born in my family,” he explained.  Elmer held up a small, red square of yarn, “This is my twentieth.”  I couldn’t help but smile.  When he switched gears, going on a tangent about baking apple pies, my mouth watered.

“Did you top it with Cool Whip?” I asked.

“No!” he said indignantly.  “We cranked our own ice cream.”

Behind the wrinkles, I saw a man who loved his family fully and still savored life.  I wouldn’t mind being this man in seventy years.

The clock in the dining room chimed twelve times, signaling lunch and the end of our conversation.  I had been listening to Elmer for three hours.  The next day for more than a half hour, Elmer recounted his childhood memories of collecting empty milk bottles.

The trip ended, and I found myself at home with my friends.  It would have been easy to forget and old bespectacled man with socks up to his knees, but I immediately wrote him a letter.

A week later, an envelope, addressed in slanted script turned up in my mailbox.  He asked about cross country and told me to have fun at least three times.  I responded and eagerly awaited his next letter.  Throughout the rest of the summer, as we exchanged mail, Elmer told me about his wife’s death, his open-heart surgery, and his entrance into the assisted living home.  Even after such hardships, he was happy now.  “Moving here was no the beginning of the end,” Elmer wrote.  “It was the start of a new adventure—a new part of my life.  Sort of like your going to college, my young friend.  Enjoy life.”