The Letter That Arrived on a Tuesday

In 1987, a retired Sunday school teacher named Dorothy Caldwell lived alone in a small apartment in Terre Haute, Indiana. She had spent thirty-one years teaching fourth graders at First Community Church, and most days she wondered whether any of it had taken root.

Then a letter arrived — handwritten, postmarked from Nairobi. A man named James Odhiambo wrote to tell her that he was the boy who sat in the third row of her class in 1974. His family had been new to the country, struggling with English, and Dorothy had stayed after class every Wednesday to read Bible stories with him. He wanted her to know that he was now pastoring a congregation of six hundred in Kenya, and that he still remembered the afternoon she taught him Psalm 23 by walking with him through the park behind the church, pointing to the creek and saying, "That is your still water. The Lord is already leading you beside it."

Dorothy read the letter four times. She told her neighbor it was the finest thing she had ever received.

The aged apostle John knew exactly this feeling. Writing to his beloved Gaius, he declared, "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth." Not success, not reputation, not comfort — but the knowledge that someone he had loved into the faith was still walking that road. For those who pour themselves into others, there is no richer reward.