Every Day Deserves A Chance

Joseph didn't fit the prototype of a greeter. He didn't smell good. His salt-and-pepper beard seemed to reach his waist. A woolen hat contained his wiry hair. He'd lost more teeth than he'd kept. Other churches might have placed someone else at the front door of the church. But the Netivya congregation didn't. They knew his story and loved to retell it.

As Hitler ravaged eastern Europe decades earlier, Joseph was captured and imprisoned in a concentration camp. As he and hundreds of others were marched to the prison, he spotted a book protruding from the pocket of a dead Jew lying on the side of the road. He snatched and hid it, only later realizing it was a New Testament. He was able to read most of it before a guard at the camp took it from him.

After several months of unspeakable horrors, he escaped and eked out an existence in the woods for two years. At one point the hunger and cold compromised his better judgment, and he knocked on the door of a farmhouse, looking for food. He had no way of knowing an SS party was taking place within.

The Nazi officer who answered the door knew in a moment that Joseph was an escaped prisoner. he stepped onto the porch and closed the door behind him. "Do you know who I am?"

Joseph could only reply, "I am hungry."

After what seemed to Joseph like an eternity, the German holstered his pistol. "Hitler is a thousand miles from here, and he'll never know what I do." He entered the house and returned with a basket of food.

Joseph knew someone was protecting him.

After the war he made his way to Israel. The cruelty had exacted a high cost on his mind; he had trouble eating, carrying on a conversation, keeping a job. In many ways he checked out of civilization. Sometime in the early 1960s, a hitchhiking Joseph was given a ride by a Christian minister--Joe Shulam. When Joseph spotted a New Testament on the dash of the minister's car, he remembered the one he'd smuggled into the camp and asked to hear about Jesus. He said he wouldn't leave the car until he'd heard the entire story. The minister gladly obliged, and Joseph realized that Jesus had swayed the heart of the Nazi officer on that porch years before.

Joseph chose to follow Christ. Shulam took him to the church, and Joseph never left. He spent the rest of his days under the care of the congregation, greeting guests and writing letters to Christians around the world.

He, like the apostle Paul, indwelt a prison of misfortune. And he, like Paul, turned his cell into a commissary of hope. It's not easy to find joy in jail. Not easy to make the best of a derailed life. But God sends enough Paul and Joseph stories to convince us to give it a try.

From Max Lucado's book, Every Day Deserves A Chance