Mabel's Story

Sometimes 'inspirational' stories are pretty shallow, especially in the Christian culture. But this one is true and it is powerful. I read it in the book "The Life You've Always Wanted" by John Ortberg.


Mabel’s Story

“The state-run convalescent hospital is not a pleasant place. It is large, understaffed, and overfilled with senile and helpless and lonely people who are waiting to die. On the brightest of days it seems dark inside and it smells of sickness and stale urine. I went there once or twice a week for four years, but never wanted to go there, and I always left with a sense of relief. It is not the kind of place one gets used to.

On this particular day I was walking in a hallway that I had not visited before, looking in vain for a few who were alive enough to receive a flower and a few words of encouragement. This hallway seemed to contain some of the worst cases, strapped onto carts or into wheelchairs and looking completely helpless.

As I neared the end of this hallway, I saw an old woman strapped up in a wheelchair. Her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly. I was told later that when new nurses arrived, the supervisor would send them to feed this woman, thinking that if they could stand this sight they could stand anything in the building. I also learned later that this woman was eighty-nine years old and that she had been here, bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone, for twenty-five years. This was Mabel.

I don’t know why I spoke to her-she looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in that hallway. But I put a flower in her hand and said, ‘Here is a flower for you. Happy Mother’s Day.’ She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it, and then she spoke. And much to my surprise, her words, although somewhat garbled because of her deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind. She said, ‘Thank you. It’s lovely. But can I give it to someone else? I can’t see it, you know, I’m blind.’

I said, ‘Of course,’ and I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought I could find some alert patients. I found one, and I stopped the chair. Mabel held out the flower and said, ‘Here, this is from Jesus.’

That was when it began to dawn on me that his was not an ordinary human being. Later I wheeled her back to her room and learned more about her history. She had grown up on a small farm that she managed with only her mother until her mother died. Then she ran the farm alone until 1950 when her blindness and sickness sent her to the convalescent hospital. For twenty-five years she got weaker and sicker, with constant headaches, backaches, and stomachaches, and then the cancer came too. Her three roommates were all human vegetables who screamed occasionally but never talked. They often soiled their bedclothes, and because the hospital was understaffed, especially on Sundays when I usually visited, the stench was often overpowering.

Mabel and I became friends over the next few weeks, and I went to see her once or twice a week for the next three years. Her first words to me were usually an offer of hard candy from a tissue box near her bed. Some days I would read to her from the Bible, and often when I would pause she would continue reciting the passage from memory, word-for-word. On other days I would take a book of hymns and sing with her, and she would know all the words of the old songs. For Mabel, these were not merely exercises in memory. She would often stop in mid-hymn and make a brief comment about lyrics she considered particularly relevant to her own situation. I never heard her speak of loneliness or pain except in the stress she placed on certain lines in certain hymns.

It was not many weeks before I turned from a sense that I was being helpful to a sense of wonder, and I would go to her with a pen and paper to write down the things she would say …

During one hectic week of final exams I was frustrated because my mind seemed to be pulled in ten directions at once with all of the things that I had to think about. The question occurred to me “What does Mabel have to think about – hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it’s day or night? So I went to her and asked, ‘Mabel, what do you think about when you lay here?’

And she said, ‘I think about my Jesus.’

I sat there, and thought for a moment about the difficulty, for me, of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes, and I asked, ‘What do you think about Jesus?’ She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote …:

‘I think about how good he’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know.… I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied. … Lots of folks wouldn’t care much for what I think. Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old-fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.’

And then Mabel began to sing an old hymn:

Jesus is all the world to me,
My life, my joy, my all.
He is my strength from day to day,
Without him I would fall.
When I am sad, to him I go,
No other one can cheer me so.
When I am sad He makes me glad.
He’s my friend.

This is not fiction. Incredible as it may seem, a human being really lived like this. I know. I knew her. How could she do it? Seconds ticked and minutes crawled, and so did days and weeks and months and years of pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening – and she lay there and sang hymns. How could she do it?

The answer, I think, is that Mabel had something that you and I don’t have much of. She had power. Lying there in the bed, unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear, unable to talk to anyone, she had incredible power.

...The good news as Jesus preached it is not about the minimal requirements for getting into heaven when you die. It is about the glorious redemption of human life - your life."

I am no photographer

and this picture was taken by my cell phone.

But anyone can be good when the world looks like this.

Psalm 19

^" The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands."

Break Every Chain

No matter what is happening in my life, I always want more.

Had I known everything that would happen between the end of high school and the end of college, I would have been both shocked and filled with gratitude.

I would not have believed the good I've experienced, the amazing people I've met, the lessons I've learned, the hardships I've been blessed with, and throughout everything, how God has strengthened my belief in Him.

I am completely different than the person that walked out of Vernon Hills High School in 2004. Never mind what anyone else thinks...I would have been amazed to see myself today.

But today, now that I'm here, it's not enough.

Let me just be brutally honest with you (whoever you may be). There is a different me in my mind. The person that I want to be. This is probably the first time I've written this down, but it's generally always floating around in my head, clogging my consciousness.

So here we go, real talk, brutally honest.

The other/better me would...

- have a full time job, instead of 18 part-time ones
- have moved out right after college and not live in the suburbs
- have a naturally better singing voice that didn't take any work to achieve
- be really good at some random, unknown of entrepreneurial skill and have lots of money saved
- be confident completely whoever he is talking to, regardless of how much more awesome than me he or she may be
- be significantly less single
- never be stressed, and able to get everything done all the time without getting stressed
- have whiter teeth and hair that is not turning white (it is...)

I want more than what I have, and it bothers me. Sometimes a whole lot.

Then the other day, I read this in the Bible.

"Death and Destruction are never satisfied, and neither are the eyes of man."

Ouch... that is me. If had all those things I wanted, wouldn't I just have a new list of things? As long as I'm looking for satisfaction in the specifics of what I'm surrounded by, won't I always want more?

I think, that this proverb is in the Bible for my benefit. I can't think of anything that messes up my life more than wanting it to look differently. I think the other me is not really another me at all. I think it is Satan. I think it is a voice that has a single purpose, and that purpose is my destruction. It is a stomach that is hungry for my joy. It is hands holding chains trying to put me in them.

But then I read a verse like that, or have a real good conversation with some who cares about me, or just sit and open my heart up to God's love.

And then...

I always realize the same thing.

Joy has literally nothing to do with how picture perfect or not my life is. It has nothing to do with achieving my goals. It has nothing to do with whether I'm dating or alone. It has nothing to do with what some other person thinks about me.

The present moment is all we ever have. And in the present moment, I can always say, "God is good". In the present moment, I can always say, "God loves me". In the present moment I can always look to the grace of Jesus... extended to me. What is more important than that? What could ever make me more satisfied? What could ever give me more joy? What could bring me more peace?

And then, just like that, the voice is gone. God is moved back into the position of importance that he desires to be, because of his great love for me, the position that I need to go through life letting Him have.

I think this is a lesson I will need to keep learning, and that's ok, because God has grace for me and will let me keep learning it.

Hope this can be an encouragement to you.

- Vince

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mohyR5xowFw

ALPHA!

Hey so I don’t know who reads this, but if YOU are reading and you're in high school then AWESOME because this blog post is for you!

I help out and play music at a youth group that meets at a church in Lake Forest.

We meet once a week on Sunday nights from 7-9 pm.

For the next 7 weeks we’re doing a special thing for people who want to learn more about Christianity, aka Jesus.

It’s designed for people who are interested, who have questions, or who want to know more about the Christian faith.

If you don't believe in God at all, that's totally fine. You should still come if you want!

Basically there will be some music/singing, and then there’ll be a short talk about something related to Christianity, and then we’ll break into small groups to ask/answer questions. It is going to be SWEET!

If you are at all interested, message me on facebook or email me at vincentapierri@yahoo.com. Or just show up! :)


the address is...
100 North Waukegan Road
Lake Forest, IL 60045

Ok For the First Time

Hello everyone!

Firstly, thanks to whoever who hasn’t forgotten about me since I last put out new music.

I just wanted to write a quick blog to let ya’ll know what’s been going on with me lately. So here’s the story...
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My life has always looked pretty good on the outside.

I’ve always considered myself someone who believed in God, and I had even worked for some churches before. But in reality my insides were a big mess.

Ever since high school I had all sorts of addictions that were sucking the joy out of my life. I always thought that if I just tried really hard then I would be able to stop doing bad things and then God would accept me. But the harder I tried the more I always failed. So I lived with this constant feeling that I wasn’t good enough.

About 9 months ago, I was sitting alone in my parents living room, listening to a song called “How He Loves Us”. The song is basically about how God loves people more than we can ever really imagine. (You can listen to it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoC1ec-lYps )

As I sat there listening to that song, for some reason my eyes were opened. I always knew that God loved everyone, but at that moment I believed that He loved me specifically. I believed that He knows my name and He knows that I exist. I believed that He cares about me. I realized that I would never be good enough for God, but because Jesus died for my sins, God loves me anyway. He forgave me for all the things that I had done wrong to myself and all the things I had done wrong to other people.

From that day forward everything has been different. So many of the bad things that I hated about myself have changed on their own, because I am no longer trying to change myself. Instead I am focusing on learning more about God and giving my life to him each and every day; in response He has been doing all the work of changing my insides. I am learning more and more that God is very good.
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So that’s what this new song is about, that first moment when I believed that God’s love and forgiveness were real. I hope you like it.

You can listen to it at: myspace.com/bigcitysomeone

And you can download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/?ywkntmmxu40

Some of you may have heard people say before that God loves you. I for one had heard it a million times, but it didn’t really click until that moment. If anybody wants to talk to me about my life or God or anything in general, please feel free to message me on facebook (I don't know how/if messaging works on here...haha)

- vince

Learn to play guitar

So this is my first blog post ever. Not sure if I'll keep posting, but I'd like to.

I made a chart of the basic chords in the usual guitar keys.

If you memorize these chords and get a capo, you can basically play any song ever, especially worship music. There are obviously different ways to play these chords; these are just the versions that I like to use. There might be some errors in there too, so let me know if you find any.

Try to associate all the chords in each column together; then you'll be able to transpose songs very easily.

CLICK THE PICTURE BELOW TO SEE THE CHART!

And ask me if you have any questions!