Ministry Moments:
Angels in the Woodshed
by Lynn Ridenhour
It seems the young are always in a hurry. And I was
no exception. I wanted to hurry up and know God. I wanted to hurry up and get
to work. I hurried to get back home from work. I hurried everywhere.
God has his ways, and they’re usually backwards from ours. Isaiah put his
finger on it.
"….They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they
shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and
they shall walk, and not faint…" --Isa.40:31
God has to slow most of us down. We typically start out flying, then the
Lord slows us down to a run, and finally, to a walk. It’s….soar, run,
& walk….with God. The old Patriarchs learned to walk with God. Enoch
walked with God for 500 years and finally got so close to God that the Lord
had to translate him--and took Enoch’s entire city with him!
You want to be translated? Then slow down.
God had just the place and just the job to slow me down. Here I was, in my
early twenties, in love with God and ready to conquer the world. I wanted to
go places, see things, and see God move. I had read the autobiographies of men
like William Chalmers Burns and Robert Murray McCheyne and Hudson Taylor.
Perhaps my bride and I would join Youth With A Mission (YWAM) and sail the
seas, or become a Campus Crusader for Christ and share the four spiritual laws
on the campuses and streets of America.
God had other plans.
He put me to work in a veneer factory in a small town in Louisiana—Chatham,
Louisiana. Five miles from Eros. In the middle of Cajun country where they eat
armadillo and alligator. I’m in the middle of logging country with the
ruffians of this world. Huge truckloads of pine trees loaded on the back of
eighteen wheelers pulled in daily to the factory and dumped their precious
pine out in the yard. The factory was loud and dirty, hot and sweaty in the
summer, and cold and damp in the winter. It paid minimum wage. And I made
$1.18 an hour. Women did most of the stacking while we men did most of the
lifting, cutting, trimming, peeling, and drying.
I ran the dryer at night. Me and two other fellows. I fed and they caught
on the other end. We never saw each another during the night. The dryer, it
seemed, covered the entire building. Huge and noisy it was. Night after night
I fed stacks of pallets into the dryer. One after another. Pallet after
pallet. I went to work at 10 pm and got off the next morning at 7 am, and came
home with a hand full of splinters to be picked out with a sewing needle. I
usually had a raw potato for lunch, along with a peanut butter & jelly
sandwich and a canteen of hot coffee around three in the morning. My nineteen
year-old bride left for work with the car at 7:30 in the mornings while I hit
the sack and we paid $25 month rent for the house we lived in. We could lay in
bed at night, look up, and see the stars. There was that much space between
the walls and the roof on our house. A good rain usually soaked our bedroom. I
worked six days a week with Sundays off. And Linda and I usually saved our
money for homemade Tacos once a month.
One night at work I had had it.
Normally I was happy that there were only three of us on the night shift.
That gave me plenty of time alone to pray. I prayed while I fed the dryer. But
this night my patience had run its course. I was tired of feeding veneer at
two in the morning in Chatham, Louisiana. I was tired of all the jokes and
splinters and needles and rough characters chewing their tobacco. I was tired
of all the spittin’ and hollarin’ and cussin’. Quite honestly, I was in
a grumpy mood with God. And I told him so.
"....Lord, here I am, can’t even spend time with my wife. I’m too
tired to do much on Sundays. And I sure can’t take out and evangelize—and
that’s what I really want to be doing. Here I am stuck in this
woodshed...."
I’m carrying on and still feeding the dryer. I’m hurting on the inside.
Really hurting. I just don’t get it. I didn’t go to college to prepare for
this. I mean—I had found my juniper tree in my heart and I was sitting
underneath it. I had quit on God there in the woodshed in Chatham.
But you know, it’s in those moments—God never quits on us.
I was still feeding veneer into the dryer when someone tapped me on the
shoulder. I heard, "….I want to show you something…." I actually
heard those words. I turned around but no one was there. It was God who had
just spoken. I had heard his audible voice. Immediately my spiritual eyesight
was opened. And I saw a choir of angels suspended in midair. They were right
behind me. I was not having a vision. The angels were about four feet off the
ground and were all in rows. There were about fifteen angels in a row and they
were five rows deep. The choir of angels was shaped in a semi-circle facing
me, each angel dressed in a gorgeous transparent white robe that was gently
flapping in the wind.
Then they began to sing. O, how they sang! I felt the music
throughout my entire body and soul. I listened and watched and cried, and
couldn't stop crying. The music—it was all melody, a strange melody unlike I
had ever heard. And the language. The angels were singing in a language I had
never heard before. But it was as though I understood the meaning of their
words. My soul understood though I did not understand.
There they were serenading me—a measly earthling who a moment ago was
griping & complaining in a woodshed in Chatham to the God of the Universe.
Now He sends me a choir full of angels all the way from heaven.
"....Lynn, you alright?...." I heard someone say.
I turned around. One of the two men had walked all the way down to my end
of the dryer to see what was the matter. Veneer had stopped coming out on the
other end.
"....I’m fine...."
And the angels immediately disappeared.
