How her "stalker" helped

The young college student felt no bumps in her road as she focused on Zephaniah 3:17 “The Lord your God is with you. The Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”

On her worst days of college she remembered that God rejoiced over her. She loved God, just as she loved her father. She made the verse her motto and shared it with her father. He reveled in watching her mature, marry and begin her family as a pastor’s wife. He comforted her through two years of funerals as she and her husband buried four grandparents.

And then her beloved father died in a plane crash.

Stunned, the pastor’s wife attended yet another funeral, went home, crawled in bed and wanted to stay there forever.

“If it wasn’t for my 4-year-old, I would not have bothered to get up,” she said. “I couldn’t stay in bed. A couple times a week I had to get up, find clothes for my son and take him to church for Mother’s Day Out so he could play and learn with other children.”

“That’s where I met my Stalker. The day we met, I had forced myself out of bed, pulled on yesterday’s sweat pants and dirty T-shirt and maybe pulled a comb through my greasy hair,” she recalled. She did not care how she looked; her father was gone. Everyone was gone. Nothing mattered anymore.

At the Mother’s Day Out she saw a flicker of her life before the season of death. “I was walking in and passed this impeccably dressed mother escorting her perfectly garbed son.”

Their eyes met. The depressed woman looked away. The other woman did not. “She became my Stalker,” the pastor’s wife recalled.

“My Stalker stopped me and said, ‘I know you are busy with the ministry, but we have a small group at our house. We would love to have you come, or maybe we could meet for lunch?”

“I don’t eat lunch.” “Maybe we could meet for coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

Her Stalker kept inviting her until she finally agreed to meet for coffee.

Over coffee, her Stalker asked questions and listened. The pastor’s wife told about the four funerals followed by her beloved father’s sudden departure. “After all that, I guess my ‘give a flipper’ is broken,” she said, fighting tears and daring the other woman to try to understand the depth of her grief.

“I lost two children with miscarriages,” her Stalker said simply.

The two began occasionally meeting during

Mother’s Day out. Over coffee, they talked through their grief as their sons played.

One day, as the pastor’s wife backed up her car to leave the church, her Stalker signaled her to roll down a side window.

“I rolled it down and my Stalker tossed a package through the window, waved and drove away. I reached over and picked up a scuba diving flipper with the attached note: If your ‘give a flipper’ is broken, here’s mine. This morning I discovered Zephaniah 3:17. It made me think about you. ‘The Lord your God is with you … He will rejoice over you with singing.’”

The pastor’s wife gasped, “I had never told her about that verse.” God had not left. He still sang over her.

Slowly, she regained her “give a flipper” because, a friendly Stalker pursued and reminded her that God rejoiced over her with song even during the worst of times.