Errands for God Part 1

By James Kelly

In Errands for God, Part 1, Jim Kelly creates the beautiful story of family loved, lost, and then regained through the inner weaving and working of God.

This is the story of a man named Frank Miller and of his hidden talents. Together they bring hope to a community faced with an unimaginable evil whose tentacles reach worldwide, ensnaring millions of people in their evil grasp.

Frank is faced with the choice of getting involved or going his own way, just as we are every day in different ways. There are many forks in the road of decision, and Frank must choose which one he is willing to take.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Sep 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781490808352

James Kelly

James Kelly has been involved in both church-based ministries and theological education at the undergraduate level both in Canada and internationally. He has pastored in Asian and North American contexts in the Lower Mainland of the West Coast of Canada.

Book preview

ERRANDS

FOR GOD

Part 1

JAMES KELLY

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Copyright © 2013 James Kelly.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved

WestBow Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

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A Division of Thomas Nelson

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4908-0834-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-0833-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-0835-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013916450

WestBow Press rev. date: 09/25/2013

Contents

Preseason

1.   Decision Hispaniola

2.   The North American

3.   Frank Comes to Town

4.   So the Gringo Can Play Baseball

5.   Trying to End It

6.   Belief Is a Verb

7.   The Myth of Tolerance

8.   No Completely Lost Cause

Midseason

9.   Play Ball

10.   Ninety-Nine Miles per Hour

11.   Caribbean Championship

12.   Beaten Like a Punching Bag

13.   Puerto Rico

14.   Squeeze Play

15.   Christmas

16.   A Tremendous Shaking

Postseason

17.   Two Days Later

18.   On into Haiti

19.   Salvation

20.   The Race for a Life

21.   The Setup

22.   Heaven’s Entrance

Epilogue

Preseason

Midseason

Postseason

Chapter One

Decision Hispaniola

Everyone has a story. We just think ours is the most important. Ours is the old story of life and what it will encompass and the new story of death and the experience afterward, going either way. Some people say that at the end there is no beginning or that the end is the real beginning. Normally people can tell the story of their lives and, up to a point, the story of their death. The ending, however, is usually not written by them. We are all actors in this huge drama that is played out on a gigantic screen for the universe to somehow observe and comment on. We cannot take credit for the play, even though we, along with God, are coauthors of its failures and successes—though the successful scripts are always written by him.

It’s funny how people end up places. A lot of times they just do, without prompting. Sometimes it’s a plan and sometimes it’s not. With me it was a plan. With Frank Miller it wasn’t. He just drifted—or shall I say flew—in and didn’t leave.

At first he was generally intoxicated and appeared to be in some terrible pain that was not altogether physical. He seemed to be in the grip of some sort of mental agony that was afflicting him to the point where he couldn’t obtain a release from it himself. When the end of his story came, however, he renewed my faith in God and eventually in other people.

How I came to the island where the Dominican Republic and Haiti lay was more complicated and roundabout. I guess I could have done what most people from my generation have done, which was to stay in America and live the life we had been spoiled to believe was ours by right.

It just so happened that at the time I made the visit, I was in my last year of medical school, and my friends and I had all decided to do spring break there. It was on a whim at the last moment that I departed with five of my buddies, spending time on the beaches and partying—until I went into the interior among the people and my heart broke when I saw the poor. They say that the poor are the fertilizer for doing kind acts for others, and I believe that is true.

The poor as a group stayed with me even when I closed my eyes, and their smell pervaded my dreams for many months as I slept and woke the days away back in the security of the States.

Still thinking about them for many months, I did the typical thing that most Americans do before they hit thirty: I got married. This was to a women I met while completing my residency at two different hospitals. To complete the stereotype she was a nurse. My wife, it turned out, was one of those quiet, forceful types whose presence and humor always lit up a room. She seemed to know that I had an inward calling on my life to do something hilariously crazy, although even at that time I didn’t know it myself.

She, of course, like most women eventually do, pried the information out of me after several months of marriage. She seemed to know I was holding something inside that I hadn’t yet told her.

That something spilled out on a night I wasn’t on call from the hospital. We had gone out for an early dinner and then a walk in a safe part of the city. It was an area where you could totally focus on the person with you, rather than the possible danger of your surroundings.

Finally the conversation moved into the area I had been avoiding. It was a secret area of my mind that I hadn’t really wanted to share with her until now. When I told her haltingly that I wanted to move to the Dominican Republic and practice medicine among the poor people there, she didn’t freak out like I thought she would. Leaving New York hadn’t even occurred to her. It was the center of her universe, her galaxy of family and friends.

While we were walking, I told her a story just to try and convince her. I guess at the time I thought she still needed convincing—and so did I, to be honest.

I told her a story about a rabbi friend of mine she didn’t yet know and who now lived far away. This person at the time had quit medical school, gotten married, and gone into ministry. When the couple’s first child came along, their baby was born blind, a consequence of birthing complications. Of course, they were heartbroken and didn’t know what to do. They stumbled along for a few years, not really having a blueprint for this part of their lives and not knowing where it would take them. Like most parents they’d had no training for raising children, especially one with this kind of disability.

When their blind son was four years old, they took a trip to Mexico with another couple purely for pleasure and an escape from their hectic life. Their second morning in Mexico, they were browsing in the downtown market, looking at the local goods. At one of the stalls, they stopped to negotiate over a native-made leather handbag with two women who were running the business and standing behind their stall barrier.

While they were haggling over the price of the purse, one of the native women, who had been studying their blind son, abruptly left, leaving the negotiating to her friend. A few short minutes later she returned with a little boy about the same age as my friends’ son. Looking at the opaqueness of his eyes, they realized that he too must be blind. The native woman took her own blind boy’s hand and placed it in the hand of my friend’s son and squeezed the two together. Then she turned around and left, leaving the boy behind. They never saw her again, even after much inquiring and imploring to the other woman for her name and whereabouts.

My friend and his wife didn’t know what to do until they looked in the Mexican boy’s beat-up bag that his mother had looped around his wrist. There was a note in the bag written in Spanish that they had translated by a passerby for a few pesos.

The note instructed the couple to take the boy to an address that was written on the paper. That was all it said. There were no apologies or other instructions. So they took an insane taxi ride to the address on the paper, thinking the whole time that maybe they should contact the police or some other authority.

When they arrived at the address they had been given and knocked at the door, a German woman opened the door and invited them inside. She looked at the two blind boys and without saying a word led them into another room, where four other blind children of different ages were sitting around quietly in a large, older room, listening to a children’s radio broadcast in Spanish.

She explained to them in English that she and her husband had moved to Mexico about fifteen years earlier to retire and had bought about six hundred acres with the money they had saved over their lifetime. Most of it was grass and scrubby trees, but there was a spring that broke out from the base of a butte in the corner of the property and lent its value to the property as a whole. With a water source, the land could be developed.

The German woman’s husband had died late last year, and for the past few months she had been praying to God in an unorganized way to give her life some purpose and meaning during her last years.

Then, three months before, with no warning, people started dropping off blind children on her doorstep. She had not advertised for this to happen. It just had, and word spread. The children themselves were anywhere from the ages of two to twelve. It started with one and went on from there. The woman really didn’t have a plan, except to feed them and give them shelter. Distrusting authority, she never considered getting the government involved. She was now in her seventies and was afraid of what would happen to the children when she was gone.

My friend and his wife left the little blind Mexican boy with the woman and also left her some money. My friend promised to get back in touch with her, and then they went back to Los Angeles, troubled by the whole affair. They wondered if they should have gotten in touch with the Mexican authorities but also knew that the child could have been heartlessly warehoused as a result. They thus had a dilemma of God’s choosing, and so, like most people, their minds worked in ways to get around it and not be troubled by the whole affair.

After several days of thinking and moping around their house, my friend announced to his wife that he wanted to move to Mexico and start a school for orphaned and abandoned blind kids. That was where he wanted to live and what he wanted his life work to be. To his amazement, with little dissenting discussion, his wife agreed.

The next few months were more than a flurry of activity. They sold or gave away everything they didn’t want or have a need for. Some of the best lessons they learned overall were in giving their things away. It gave them sort of a release from material things and their grip on them. Quite freeing overall, he said to me later.

All the remaining things they put into an old Greyhound bus they had bought from the sale of their things and house. My friend told me that after he had resigned from his ministry and they were driving away in their bus, he experienced one of the most calming moments of his life. The most stressful came when they arrived in Mexico, and the stress stayed for several months until things got sorted out.

Finally, they legally bought one hundred acres from the woman herself and built a school for orphaned