Leamon

Leamon hung up the phone, threw the necessities in the back of his van and hit the road. Verizon had work for him in League City, 1200 miles away. The money was good and his wife was already gone to a training conference, so he set out to join the hundreds, perhaps thousands of workers who have flooded into the bay area in recent weeks to get our power, water, phone and cable working again, pick up our trash, and repair our roofs and fences.

Somewhere around Beaumont on Saturday night, Leamon's transmission started talking to him. By the time he reached Houston he could smell the burning transmission fluid. As his van limped into the parking lot of the Verizon service center in League City late Saturday night, the transmission refused to shift gears. He gathered a few things out of the back, left the van where it sat, and walked about 6 blocks to the Super 8 for a little sleep before returning to his van early Sunday morning. A night's rest did nothing for his transmission. He was stuck in a strange town with no transportation and no friends, and Verizon would be closed for another 24 hours. Leamon thought to himself: "What am I going to do now? Well, it's Sunday. What do you do on Sunday?" He looked across the street at the YMCA, and noticed on the marquis that a church was meeting there. "Go to church, " he said to himself, grabbed his Bible from the seat of his van and walked over.

He walked in the back of the gym-turned-auditorium and took a seat on an unoccupied row. The pastor was addressing this fledgling congregation: "we have to take the initiative in relationships. We aren't an unfriendly church because we don't care about people. We're an unfriendly church because we're all new, few of us know each other, and we're all waiting for someone else to take the initiative." Then he asked everyone in the room to put on a name tag, seek out someone they didn't know, and take a few moments to get to know them. The next thing Leamon knew, he was telling his story to a married couple. After the service, several other people greeted him and learned of his predicament.

"Leamon, what do you need?"
"I think I need jackstands and some transmission fluid."
"I don't live far from here. If you can hang around for a few minutes, I'll go get the jackstands and come back."

Hang around for a few minutes? He had all day, and where else did he have to go? The jackstands arrived momentarily, and after a ride to Autozone for transmission fluid and a filter, Leamon got to work on his van. His delivery driver came back a couple of hours later to find him cleaning up after a successful transfusion of fluid and filter. As the two men cleaned up the remaining debris from the transmission job, Leamon turned to the stranger and said, "I don't know if anyone has told you this today or not, but I love you." He laughed as he said it, the nervous laughter of a man whose real needs had been met by strangers, and who just blurted out words men don't say to each other. But both men understood.

Presumably, Leamon is around here somewhere today, repairing someone's phone lines. Or maybe he isn't.

Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it. --Hebrews 13:2 TNIV