Two Old Ladies Changing Lives

My first church was in a tiny hamlet called Temple, Maine.  There were only four hundred people in the whole town, and the congregation itself had a budget well under five thousand dollars.  The church building had just one room, the sanctuary, and seated one hundred at most.  There wasn't even a bathroom---just an outhouse.

When I went to Temple I was still a student in seminary.  The church was about eighty-five miles from school, and before I drove out to my first service there I was warned I'd be very lucky to have twenty people in church, but not to be shocked if there were only eight or nine.

Imagine my surprise then, when I showed up half-an-hour early for the ten o'clock service, and found the tiny sanctuary full of children--about fifty of them!  Many of them were dressed in very worn out clothes, and several of them obviously hadn't bathed for some time.  They were clearly very poor.  And there in the midst of them stood two elderly ladies, teaching the class.  Each child appeared to have a study book, and as they left before the service started, each one got a treat.

The women I learned were two sisters in their eighties.  Florence and Muriel Blodgett.  Florence had been engaged once, but her fiance left her for another woman--or so the local gossip had it.  Neither of them had ever married.  They lived on the edge of town in a rambling old house that hadn't been painted in years.  One of them had been a schoolteacher, and the other had kept house.  They managed to scrape along on what little they had. 

But they knew God's grace--and they shared it!  For they single-handedly kept that Sunday school afloat.  As they had for decades.  They bought the curriculum.  They purchased audio-visual equipment.  And annually they funded a big end-of the-year party complete with lunch for all the students and their families.  A lunch that usually included sandwiches, chips, drinks, cookies, and yes, a piece of chocolate. 

Sometimes people wonder if the stuff you read in the Bible reflects reality.  Especially the upbeat stuff.  But I must say, I never saw a more perfect illustration of St. Paul's words describing one of his churches than I saw in the Blodgett sisters.  "Their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty," wrote Paul to the Corinthians, " . . . overflowed in a wealth of generosity . . . ."  (II Corinthians 8:2)

The Blodgett sisters died years ago.  And the little church in Temple closed its doors for good about ten years after I left.  But I suspect there are still some of those children, now with children of their own--maybe even grandkids--who remember the Blodgetts, and who know, because of Florence and Muriel, that God is  good.