October 2nd, 2009

Over the years the women in my Thursday night Bible study have become essential to my ability to get up and go on the next day. They’ve listened to the horror stories about my brother, reserving any judgment. They cried with me, laughed with me, and prayed with me. We’ve been there for one another and it is because of them that I recall one of my favorite stories this morning. Nothing I could write could express the need I have for this group of women better than Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy once wrote a brief allegory in which an Angel disguised as a man is sent to earth by God to learn these three lessons: what is given to men, what is not given to men, and what men live by. At the conclusion of the story, the Angel reveals his identity to the poor shoemaker who had taken him in, and speaks of the lessons he has learned. So, Mr. Tolstoy, if you don’t mind?. “The clothes fell off the body of the Angel, and he was clothed with light so that no eye could bear to look upon him, and he began to speak more terribly, as if his voice did not come from him, but from Heaven. And the Angel said: “I learned that man does not live by care for himself, but by love for others. It was not given the mother to know what was needful for the life of her children; it was not given to the rich man to know what was needful for himself; and it is not given to any man to know whether by the evening he will want boots for his living body or slippers for his corpse. When I came to earth as a man, I lived not by care for myself, buy by the love that was in the heart of a passerby, and his wife, and because they were kind and merciful to me. The orphans lived not by any care they had for themselves; they lived through the love that was in the heart of a stranger, a woman who was kind and merciful to them. And all men live, not be reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people. I knew before that God gives life to men, and desires them to live; but now I know far more. I know that God does not desire men to live apart from each other, and therefore has not revealed to them what is needful for each of them to live by himself. He wishes them to live together united, and therefore has revealed to them that they are needful to each other’s happiness.”