Give a flipper

The young college student felt no bumps in her road as she focused on Zephaniah 3:17 “The Lord your God is with you. The Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”
On her worst days of college she remembered that God rejoiced over her. She loved God, just as she loved her father. She made the verse her motto and shared it with her father. He reveled in watching her mature, marry and begin her family as a pastor’s wife. He comforted her through two years of funerals as she and her husband buried four grandparents.
And then her beloved father died in a plane crash.
Stunned, the pastor’s wife attended yet another funeral. Afterward, she wanted to stay in bed for days, weeks and months at a time.
“If it wasn’t for my four-year-old, I would not have bothered to get up,” she said.
A couple times a week, she had to get out of bed, find clothes for her child and to take him to church for Mother’s Day Out so he could play and learn with other children.
That’s where she met her Stalker.
The day they met, the pastor’s wife had forced herself of bed, pulled on yesterday’s sweat pants and dirty t-shirt. Maybe she ran a comb through her greasy hair. Who cared how she looked? Her father was gone. Everyone was gone.
At the Mother’s Day Out she felt a flicker of her life before the season of death as she passed an impeccably dressed mother escorting in her perfectly garbed son.
Their eyes met. The depressed woman looked away. The other woman did not. “She became my Stalker,” the pastor’s wife recalls.
“My Stalker stopped and said, ‘I know you are busy with the ministry, but we have a small group at our house. We would love to have you come, or maybe we could meet for lunch?”
“I don’t eat lunch,” the pastor’s wife answered abruptly.
Her Stalker persisted, “Maybe we could meet for coffee?”
“No, thanks.” she walked away.
Her Stalker kept inviting her until she agreed to meet for coffee.
Over coffee, her Stalker asked questions and the pastor’s wife answered.
She slowly told about the funerals of four grandparents and then her beloved father’s sudden departure. “After all that, my ‘give a flipper’” is broken,” she said fighting tears and daring the other woman to try to understand the depth of her grief and loss.
“I lost two children with miscarriages,” her Stalker said. She knew.
They began occasionally meeting during Mother’s Day out. Over coffee, they talked through their grief as their sons played.
One day, as the pastor’s wife backed up her car to leave the church, her Stalker signaled her to roll down the side window.
The pastor’s wife did. Her Stalker tossed a package through the window, waved and drove away. The pastor’s wife reached over and picked up a scuba diving flipper with the attached note, “If your ‘give a flipper’ is broken, here’s mine. This morning for the first time I read Zephaniah 3:17. It made me think about you. ‘The Lord your God is with you … He will rejoice over you with singing.’”
“I had never told her about that verse,” the pastor’s wife said, still astonished many years later.
Slowly she regained her “give a flipper” because, in the the midst of soul-searing grief, her Stalker reminded her that God rejoiced over her with song.


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