Willy
I did not really notice Willy at first. He is a non-assuming fifty to sixty year old African American man who speaks little but exudes contentment. He seems to me to be the image of a throwback to a distant time of a man who has weathered much, but strives with little.
Willy is a man who sits in the front row of the mission services, wearing his old fishing hat. But again, it took me a while to notice him above the rest. When I look back on our first encounter, his life comes into place. Just before service began, I introduced myself to Willy, and asked how he was doing. “I’ve beeeen better,” he said in his soft southern drawl. There wasn’t a hint of complaint in his voice, but all the people around chuckled at his response, most with more knowledge than me of the trials he endures.
His trials came to my attention one night when we began the service asking for prayer requests. Willy has terminal prostrate cancer. After the service, I stopped to talk with Willy outside and began to ask him what the doctors were saying. He told me that the doctors said to him, “There’s nothing we can do for you.” When he told his daughter the news, “She just cried, and cried.” She was going to lose a good and descent father.
I asked Willy how much time the doctors said he had to live. Whether or not they gave him a time-frame, Willy said to me with a soft chuckle, “Only the Lord knows.” How right he is. Doctors can only guess.
In contrast to preaching to whites, generally when you preach to African-Americans, you get some immediate, positive feedback (silence is negative). Willy gives feedback. It is gentle feedback. Some feedback can be boisterous and lively; Willy’s feedback is calm, confident, and exudes from deep within his soul. On occasion, I preach repetitive lines which hammer home a point. He will sometimes jump on board with those lines. When familiar verses of Scripture are quoted, he speaks the words with me. And when a point is made which is agreeable to him, he bellows out, “A-men.”
But the thing that impresses me most about Willy’s feedback is that it is not about me or any other preacher—it is about God and His Word going forward. All the points that I drive home which resonate with the crowd, or chorus-like lines which he (and others) jump on board with do not seem to compare with the resonance which goes to the depths of his soul when reading Scripture.
It almost takes me off guard. No, it really takes me off guard. You see, I expect the ‘amens’ and the talking back, and the talking with me when they can. But Willy is teaching me something about the Word of God. You see, when I preach, sometimes I choose to read a verse (or a few verses), then preach on the verse, then read, then preach and so-forth. But sometimes, just as I am finishing the reading, and ready to explain the sometimes difficult verses, I get startled by an exuberant, low-rumbling, “Aa-men!”
How precious are these words to him. Sure he enjoys the preaching well enough, but really, the words that are giving him life and hope are the words of the Living God. Oh that I would begin to believe truly in my heart, like Willy does, that this is true—that this is the living and enduring, imperishable Word of God.
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