This weekend at church we sang the song “Jesus paid it All” an old hymn and a very good hymn. We also sang this song a while back and there is one line in this hymn that has struck me more lately than maybe any other hymn in my life. “He changed the leper’s spots” Now these are the first two times that this line has ever caught my attention and really I guess I never knew or ever paid attention to it. I really didn’t know what the complete meaning or understanding of that line. I didn’t know what leper’s spots really were and never really cared to look into it as I thought it was something from the past and didn’t really exist anymore. Well, while in Ethiopia we were able to visit a Leper Siam. This is a village or area within the capital city Addis Ababa where lepers can live and work. Now I still fully don’t know or understand the spots and everything leprosy can do to a human being but what I do know is that these spots on this Ethiopian man are unmistakable. To think that when I look at myself as a sinner, I am also unmistakable without His saving Grace to wash away my sins. That He came to pay that price to take away those sins and to wash them away and make me whole and complete again. I guess the visual here makes this song oh so much more real now that I have a better grasp on the realness of the possible thoughts of the artist.
Now the impact this man had on my life didn’t stop there. I saw him two years in a row sitting there on the cement making rugs like shown in the picture with his hands that don’t really have fingers but the leprosy spots and missing fingers. I am assuming from leprosy is not what caught my attention. What caught my attention was more about his joy his happiness in life. So I think about how I sit at my desk at work in my cushioned chair with a back rest non-the-less, behind a computer, in an air-conditioned building and yet I still find a way on some days to complain. Yet this man has greeted me both years I have seen him with a smile from ear to ear in shear happiness and joy. Makes me evaluate my perspective on life as he is such an incredible man and I don’t even know his name. I hope to see him again some day in the future and bring him this picture and hopefully talk to him about how his joy and happiness has affected my life in this past year and thank him for that. I wonder if he is a Christian? What his story is? Where he has come and just information about him?
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