Sharon's Law

Not long ago I flew to New York to spend a few days teaching at Word of Life Bible Institute. Because of dense fog that closed Midway Airport, my flight was delayed for six hours. While I was waiting near the gate, a woman named Sharon took the seat next to me. I know her name because she introduced herself and started chatting with me. When she found out I was flying to New York to teach Galatians, she said that she had been in a Bible study of the book of James with some women from her neighborhood.

She and her husband are farmers from western Illinois. She was traveling to Baltimore to visit her son. At this point the story gets a bit complicated. If I got it right (and I think I did but I'm not certain), she and her husband have two sons, both of them raised in the Christian faith but neither son attends church at this point. The son in Baltimore lives in a house with a woman he used to date years ago. The woman was never married but has a child by someone else. The son and the woman he once dated are still good friends. The woman's child is six years old and Sharon loves her as if she were her own granddaughter. Plus there is a third person who lives in the same house. I guess he's a friend of the son and of the woman. The son and the woman he once dated are not "living together" in the usual sense of that phrase. So I said, trying to piece it all together, it's sort of like the TV show Three's Company, only with two guys and a girl. Yes, sort of, Sharon said with a smile. Her son and the woman don't plan to get married but the son says neither one of them is likely to marry anyone else given their current housing arrangements. And to be precise, Sharon was flying to Baltimore to take care of the "granddaughter" because the mother (her son's former girl friend, now a regular friend, I guess you'd say, and also a housemate) works for the government and was flying to Iceland for some sort of high-level conference. I think that about covers it. I told Sharon that I barely understood it all and didn't think I could diagram it on paper.

When all is said and done, Sharon's greatest desire is to see her son rededicate his life to the Lord. She had wrestled with all of the other details and complicating circumstances until one day the Lord told her, "Sharon, you just love him. I'll change him." And that's what she decided to do. Since then, everything has gone much better. "I just love him, and I let the Lord take care of everything else," she said. That's Sharon's Law, and it sounds just right to me.

Email: raypritchard@calvarymemorial.com