My New Friend Larry

By David Hobbs

I was getting on the freeway in Sacramento to drive home to Marysville when I spied a hitchhiker at the onramp. “Where you going?” I asked the older man.
“Marysville.”
“Well you’re in luck, my friend, climb in.”
His name was Larry, Larry Watkins. He’d been waiting at the onramp for 3 hours in the cold. He was actually heading to Oroville, north of Marysville, where he lived.
I’m always looking for the divine connection in everything unusual that happens in my life. “Lord why did you have me pick Larry up? What do you want to say to him? I pray for Your guidance.”
We got to talking. He grew up in Oklahoma, was a veteran from the Viet Nam War, on Social Security disability. Larry mentioned the Lord a few times so I figured he’d opened the subject. “So you’re a Christian then?”
He admitted he was, though he said he wasn’t a church attender, and it was fairly obvious he was not a current practitioner. We talked about my church and my faith. Then he told me about his family, and their strong faith back in Oklahoma. Stirred by the memories, he related how he would study the Bible as a kid and then preach messages to his dad, messages that often brought tears to his father’s eyes. “You gonna be a fine preacher someday Larry,” his father used to tell him.
Warming to his subject, he began preaching to me, telling me of the power, glory and love of God and His total faithfulness. “I believe you’ve still got some preacher left in you,” I told him, to which he preached even more fervently.
Then the Holy Spirit reminded me of something. There was a time in my life I would have been interrupting Larry in order to share with him the importance of getting back into church. I would have been looking for opportunities to lecture him on being faithful to his divine calling, that the Lord must have allowed me to pick him up for that very purpose: to admonish and challenge him to get his act together, and lecture lecture yada yada.
“Wow, that’s exactly what I would have been doing,” I admitted to the Holy Spirit. “that is what I’ve done with people over and over again!”
“Now isn’t this easier?” the Holy Spirit said. “Let him do it, let his own words remind and convict and encourage and strengthen him. You don’t have to do a thing: just relax, listen, and let him convict himself. It’s a lot easier for Me to use his own words to prod him later than your judgmental ones!”
After that I sat back, drove on and listened to Larry relive his glory days, not even tempted to jump in with the charge, “So what happened? Why aren’t you still serving God? Why aren’t you fulfilling the prophecy of your father?” We all get derailed by life from time to time. That’s why the Bible calls us sheep. Have you ever seen a sheep-trail? They wander all over the place.
Larry was hungry so I took him home and cooked him a good breakfast before taking him to the edge of town to catch a ride the rest of the way to Oroville. I gave him my card with my phone number and asked him to call me. No lectures, just love, meeting needs, and letting him paint the picture of his desired future with his own words. There’s the picture Larry; now it’s up to you to go after it and get it! After listening to my dad speak a church preaching engagement into being for me a few months before in Ohio (see previous post, “My Dad the Prophet,” of 11/22/09), I was sufficiently impressed with the power of the spoken word to let him run with it.
I don’t know for certain if Larry will be able to recover his walk with the Lord, but it is a lot more likely to happen than if I’d self-righteously lectured him on what he was doing wrong and how he’d failed God.