Lessons in life

Recently I helped out a neighbor significantly by giving them money plus quite a few acres of property that I owned. This family is hard scrabble poor and lives in a small tenant home adjacent to my property. They have recently been through some very difficult times. They spent their life savings and ran up all of their credit cards as they fought a long losing battle to save their daughter’s life. Unfortunately their daughter lost that battle and she died earlier this year. Their loss has weighed heavily on her parents, especially her mother who has been overwhelmed with grief. If that was not enough the husband lost his construction job in our bad economy and by the time I came along they were down to just $22 in their bank account.

When I discovered their plight I was filled with compassion for them. I learned that they had another, older, daughter who wanted to move near them. Her moving back home would be a big help to her mother who was struggling emotionally, but of course they barely had enough resources to buy groceries much less help their daughter buy land, a trailer, and pay relocation costs. I rarely make snap decisions, but I decided on the spot that this family had been through enough already.

I hate to admit it but it was difficult for me to help this family in this way because of my own prejudice. It is an interracial family; the husband is white and his wife is black. I have never personally believed in interracial marriage. I suppose it really should not be any of my business if two people fall in love and want to get married and their skin colors are not the same, but old habits die hard. I know in my heart that God does not want me to be prejudiced in any manner and I believe He gave me this opportunity to reinforce this lesson and to make me think differently. Difficult or not I put my prejudice aside and helped them out that very day.

As you might imagine this thrilled them to death and now they think I am their blessing from God. I look at it just the opposite. They are my blessing from God. As I have become better acquainted with them I subsequently have learned that they are very fine people who attend a local Pentecostal church and that they also have a small gospel group and they travel and sing in various churches in our area. They love the Lord and are contributing to help build His kingdom by devoting the musical talent that God has given them to God. We are brother and sister in Christ.

The story does not end here. Since then I bought another 1000 acres of land and needed an easement through one of my African American neighbor’s property in order to connect my existing plantation to the new acreage. This neighbor wanted to charge a ridiculously exorbitant one-time payment plus a high annual fee for me to go through his property. It was a total rip-off and I refused.

Interestingly the wife of the family that I recently helped out was related to this guy and got wind of it. On her own volition she graciously made arrangements to obtain an easement to my property via another route that went through her grandmother’s property and thus saved me an enormous amount of money in having to build a very expensive road through a swamp on my alternative route. In fact I saved so much money in road building costs that it far and above exceeded what I had given to them in money and acreage.

Hmmm I truly believe that I got a blessing from God for helping them out. Maybe He threw in a little extra for my having put aside my prejudice in order to do it. I also got a blessing for helping out a couple that was desperately in need of help. They got a blessing by helping me find an affordable way to access my new property.

Lots of blessings have been going around this neighborhood, but I think my biggest blessing was in realizing that being prejudiced is just wrong and that if we obey our Lord and Savior we cannot go wrong

Luke 6:38
Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”