“Let all that you do be done with love.” 1 Corinthians 16:14

Violet, Part 1

Violet (name changed) was our God-assigned project. She was my next-door neighbor, and at 101 years of age, she needed a lot of neighborly help. She was the meanest, crankiest, most unreasonable and opinionated person I’d ever met. And God put us right beside her, out in the country, up a long dirt road, with no other neighborly help to be had.

My first introduction to her was when my young boys were playing basketball in our driveway. We heard yelling; looking around a bush, we saw a very old, tiny, dark-skinned, white-haired woman, waving something in the air and screaming at the boys that she was going to call the police. There was something odd about how she was dressed. We peeked between the leaves and saw that she wore her bra on the outside of her shirt.

We had lots of encounters over the years just like that first one. She would shoot a gun in the air if we made even the slightest noise. She called the volunteer fire department when we lit our barbecue. (Once we were roasting marshmallows at a summer sleepover for one of the kids; the firemen said they were accustomed to her calls and always arrived wearing their uniforms since she would shoot at them if they arrived in civilian clothes. They joined us for marshmallows, greatly adding to the exuberant joy of that 5-year-old’s birthday party with his friends.)

We gave Violet our phone number in case she had an emergency, and she called us one day asking my husband to come over. It should be noted at this point that she lived in a very dilapidated single-wide trailer with mountains of trash, junk, and rusted cars, buses, and trucks around it. When he arrived, he found that her emergency was that she wanted her “buckets” emptied. She did not trust toilets and used buckets instead. We called the city and were told there was no law against dumping human waste in one’s yard out in the country, so my husband complied with her request.

Another time, she called me to come bring her “medicine.” I asked what medicine she needed, and she said she had a rash on her foot. I told her I am not a doctor and she should see a doctor for medicine. She let loose with a tirade, and hung up. Then she called back a couple more times, as if we had not already had that conversation, and told me to bring medicine. I finally took a triple antibiotic over to her, thinking it would be an innocent treatment for a rash. It turns out that her “rash” was a bad burn she had received some time earlier while emptying woodstove ashes.

I can tell you, I was not as willing as it sounds in this writing. This was very difficult for me, as I had spent a lifetime behind the strong walls of being in the company of people I am comfortable with. I will tell more of the story in tomorrow’s devotional.

“Father, give us compassion for the difficult people You have sent to us. May we love them every bit as much as You do. And may we embrace the changes in ourselves that You sent them for. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”