Tuesday, May 24th, 2016
HOLLOW FACES
I love the Irish people who populate the land of my ancestors. They were a friendly lot and always willing to take the time to help a stranger (me) find his way. I pulled into a gas station in County Clare and asked a young man at a pump how to get to a certain village. His answer was, “Follow me. I’ll take you there. You’d never find it on your own.”
Though kind and helpful, there was a hollowness in the faces of most of the people I talked to because what they did, they did out of themselves. When I offered a Bible to them (I’m a Gideon, you know) or talked to them about God, most of them turned their eyes away. But not all. I talked to a mother and her teen-age daughter in the Dublin Airport. They were believers, and their faces showed it. We had a wonderful conversation, the last one I had in Ireland before returning to Minnesota.