My Most Memorable Easter

Traveling takes it out of you. Some how I thought yesterday was Easter. I was thinking as I was walking around this morning about Easter years ago, my most memorable Easter. I grew up in a small (75 people) town in north central Ohio. It was called Lock Seventeen. Reportedly the seventeenth lock on the old Ohio and Erie Canal. I know I skated on the old canal as a kid and there were remnants of a cement structure there, presumably the lock?

There was a great man who lived down the street, a truck driver, who always was there for anything anyone needed. His name was Virgil Lindon. As a kid, Virg would do anything for us from fixing our bikes, to helping our parents with whatever might be wrong at home and needed fixing. I always loved to stop by Virgil's house because he was always working on something mechanical and that suited the kid of eight or nine, maybe ten I was at the time I'm relating.

I stopped down on what turned out to be Easter Sunday morning to get my bike fixed. Virgil was sitting on his front porch, smoking a sweet smelling pipe and dressed in a jet black suit. That was not something I'd seen him in before. He welcomed me up as always but as I asked about getting the chain on my bike fixed and some other things it needed he asked me to sit down.

For the next long while he related to me a story I could never forget. He said on Easter Sunday many years before he'd was serving on a submarine in the US Navy during World War II when it was hit on Good Friday by a Japanese torpedo. It was stuck beneath the sea and they had just three days worth of air supply. To a young kid hooked on things military anyway, Virgil's story entralled me as I sat in the early spring sun next to him on his front porch swing.

He and the rest of the crew worked around the clock and prayed continually for a fix that would allow them to surface. The damage was severe. On Easter Sunday, after what my good neighbor said was a harrowing three days, and with only a couple hours of air supply remaining, they got the sub fixed and surfaced, an answer to prayer from Almighty God according to Virgil.

To me Easter was a day for Easter eggs and candy. To Virgil, it was the day he promised the Lord he would always honor that day if his life and those of his shipmates were spared. As a young boy with no religious training. Virgil's tail was exciting and adventurous but I didnt know about God or the Lord or prayer as he didnt have a seat at our dinner table.

It would be years later, in my late twenties when I got to know the same God Virgil introduced me to so many years ago. I never forgot that story. He didnt fix my bike because he made a deal with God he wouldnt work on Easter Sunday, ever. And you know what? He kept his promise and taught a little boy about honor and prayer and God.

With all we have going on in the world today, well, just thought I'd share that as it came to mind this morning. I hope we all had a Virgil somewhere and I hope more that we can all be a Virgil in the future, for someone else along our journey.

Have a great week ...