Something Nice

Some time ago, a Catholic priest was interviewed on a TV program. The host asked him about the nature of Jesus. Instead of lecturing him on theology, the priest asked if he could tell a true story.

He told about a woman who went to her priest and told him she thought her father was dying; would the priest please come by to see him?” He promised he would when he was in the neighborhood. “I’m sometimes out to run to the store,” said the woman. “I’ll leave the door open. If there’s no answer to your knock, just go on in. You’ll find my dad’s room in the back.”

One day the priest stopped by. There was no answer to his knock, so he went on through to the father’s room. When he got there he found a chair pulled up close beside the bed. “Ah, you must have been expecting me,” said the priest. No, said the man, the chair hadn’t been put there for the priest. “I’ll tell you, father,” said the man, “I’d been having trouble praying. But a friend said if I would put a chair there for the Master, and pretend he was sitting here, I could talk to him more naturally. So I placed the chair there and tried it, and it really works.” “That’s fine,” said the priest. "Anything that helps.”

A few days later the woman came to the priest and told him her father had passed away. The priest expressed his sympathy and asked if her father had died easily. “Oh, I think so,” she said. “A little while before, he had called me in to show me something in the funny papers, and we both had a laugh over it. Then I went out to the store to get some milk, and when I came back he was dead.”

“I’m glad it was easy,” said the priest.

“There was just one odd thing,” said the woman.

Oh?” said the priest.

“Yes,” she said, “Apparently he had pulled a chair over to the bed and was struggling to get into it, or to use it to stand up, because when I found him he had pulled his head and shoulders over to the chair and died with his head in it.”

-same sermon from previous post

"And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am."