My Father's Angels



I wasn't paying attention at the time to the good example my father set. He wasn't consciously "setting a good example" -- he was just living life according to his values.

It was the 1950s in a small Middle Georgia farm town. Our family owned a clothing store in the middle of the main business block downtown. Six days a week, 8am until 6pm (9pm on Saturday), my father presided over his business. And sometimes an angel would come to our store.

I didn't recognize those visitors as angels. Neither did my mother, who accepted my father's decisions but referred to Daddy's angels as "bums". She was concerned that they painted hobo marks to guide others to my father. My father was, and still is, an extremely kind man. He bought them lunch.

I guess Daddy knew Mama's opinion and took precautions in case any individual "angel" might actually be an alcoholic. He would have a friendly, encouraging conversation with the person, who was shabby and obviously down on his luck.

Then Daddy would walk him across the street to the Coffee Cup Cafe and pay for him to eat the daily special, a hearty meal. Depending on how the conversation was going, Daddy would sometimes sit and have lunch with him.

Another variation on this theme was sometimes Daddy would bring the man to our house to do yard work to earn a bus ticket. Mama would feed him a good home cooked meal but would serve it to him in the kitchen or on the back steps.

Daddy explained his theory of angels to his children this way: "It's Biblical. Sometimes God sends an angel among men unawares, to test us. How we behave toward the least of his children is how we treat Him."

I remember chuckling at my "naive" father's actions later when I got more grown and more savvy. I laughed that he got it backwards about who the angel was.

Now that I am middle-aged, I'm proud to say that I realize how blessed I am to have such a wise and good man, Joseph Van Johnson, as my father and my teacher.

I am also doubly blessed to be meeting angels now myself. More than once I have recognized God Himself staring back at me from the face of a homeless mentally ill person. I understand now that my father was respecting the spirit of God that is within each of us.
by Kay Johnson McCrary

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

John 14:6

Letter Written by Fra Giovanni



I am your friend and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got, but there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven!

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see - and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look!

Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by the covering, cast them away as ugly, or heavy or hard. Remove the covering and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, by wisdom, with power.

Welcome it, grasp it, touch the angel's hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty, believe me, that angel's hand is there, the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Our joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.

Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty - beneath its covering - that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.

Courage, then, to claim it, that is all. But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are all pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.

And so, at this time, I greet you. Not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you now and forever, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.

Fra Giovanni

 "I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will havetribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”

John 16:33