“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ [6] If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you” (Luke 10:5-6).
In doing outreach and witnessing, whenever I am welcomed into someone’s home on a regular basis, I refer to the residence as a house of peace. There was a trailer court not far from the church where I pastored. One day when Larry and I went there, we were welcomed into the home of a couple. Tim and his wife were glad at first to talk with us about spiritual things. They ask us to pray for their children who had been removed from their home and been put into foster care. Having only heard their side of the story, I never truly knew what the whole story was.
They welcomed us to continue to come back to visit them. At one point, his wife shared that she was a white witch. This is a concept that promotes the idea that there are some witches who do evil and some witches who do good, with white witches being the ones who do good. When we shared with her that there is only one good spirit, the Holy Spirit, she rejected that. At some point when we came to visit them, Tim informed us that his wife had left him. He was in tears and was heart-broken. At that time, we did not know that she would never return to him.
Tim became more interested in a relationship with Jesus and started attending the church that I was pastoring. Eventually he expressed interest in being baptized. So we met together to study scriptures and discuss what repentance and baptism means, what forgiveness and God’s grace means and what it means to receive the Holy Spirit. After his baptism upon his profession of faith, he continued to attend church regularly.
Unrelated to this event, eventually my wife and I felt God was calling us to move back to my home area in Pennsylvania. I kept in touch with some of the people in my former congregation over the following years and eventually learned of Tim’s death. When I look back at Tim’s life, there was much sadness and sorrow. I don’t know what happened to his children or his wife or where they all ended up. But thankfully, Tim recognized the most important thing in life: a saving relationship with God, the Father through Jesus, the Son.