The Day An Angel Fed Angels

The Day an Angel Fed Angels

Jaye was the child of a poor Southern family, growing up in a ramshackle house on a country dirt road. Times were tough, and food was in short supply.

She was playing in the yard on a hot summer day when she heard the clanging of chains. She looked up to see grizzled men dressed in black-and-white-striped uniforms shackled together and shuffling down the road. Two armed guards led the chain gang to a shade tree where they all sat down.

One of the guards knocked on the front door and asked Jaye’s mother if his men could get a drink of water from the backyard pump. She agreed, but there was a look of concern as she pulled her girl into the house. Jaye watched from a window as prisoners were unchained one by one to hobble over and drink. After they quenched their thirst, guards and prisoners retreated to the shade.

Jaye’s mother called her to the kitchen. In the blink of an eye, she had ferreted out the final tins of tuna in the cupboard. She used the last bread in the house to make a tray of tuna fish sandwiches. Alongside them stood two pitchers of ice-cold lemonade. She passed one pitcher to Jaye, and then, lifting the tray of sandwiches and the other pitcher, she led her out of the house and across the road.

Guards and prisoners began to stand up. But Jaye’s mother said, “Oh no! Stay where you are! I’ll serve you.” With little Jaye at her side, she went down the line, filling each convict’s tin cup with lemonade and giving each man a sandwich. A white woman serving lunch to black convicts on a chain gang was no small thing in the Deep South more than fifty years ago.

Each man silently ate his tuna fish sandwich and savored a tin cup of lemonade. Jaye remembers a quiet reverence like that in a cathedral. As the prisoners got up, one man said to Jaye’s mother, “Ma’am, I’ve wondered all my life if I’d ever see an angel, and now I have. Thank you!” She softly replied, “You are all welcome. God bless you!” The prisoners moved on, their steps a bit quicker and their shoulders a little higher. Jaye never saw them again. But she remembers her mother mumbling a Bible verse about entertaining angels.

Jaye Lewis has grown up to be a wonderful writer of short stories. She still can’t recall what her mother managed to scrape together from an almost empty cupboard to feed her own family that night. Some fifty years later, she knows one thing for sure: the same angel who served that chain gang served her family that night. Jaye’s mother would disagree. She would quickly say that the real angel was more likely one of those prisoners. We never know when angels might drop by our house. They seldom look the way we picture them. Remember the story of Jaye Lewis’s mother as you interact with others today. You might want to repeat this to yourself with each encounter:

I could be a person serving an angel, or like an angel serving people.

Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it!

Hebrews 13:2