the uninvited guest

There was some mystery, for a time, to a vine that crept up from the greenery near the church; it was hardly noticeable at first. It grew from some compost that was used to pot baby palm trees. It looked like a squash vine to me, so I was expecting a yellow squash or zucchini. Then it grew more and I thought it might be an acorn squash. Then one night (maybe at midnight) it turned into a pumpkin! October seems like it's a long way off, here on the island, yet, a little seed grew up and looks about ready for Halloween. It's bright orange and looks out of place. It makes me smile every time I walk past it.

On Sunday, we continued to read through Acts...slowly...deliberately. We used a prayerful way of reading that invites the Holy Spirit to speak through the reading. We were reading the story of Paul and Silas in prison when the earthquake opens the doors and unbinds their fetters. The jailer panics, but discovers that all the prisoners are still there. The jailer ends up getting baptized; he and his whole household.

I kept picturing that jailer at the beginning of the story and at the end. I imagined the made-for-TV version of the story. I pictured a rough-looking jailer out of Game of Thrones, who is there in the shadows at the beginning, but doesn't get a zoom in shot from the camera. He's someone we might not want to talk to, and yet, he is actually where all the action takes place. This unexpected, uninvited guest in the story. In that story he seems very different to me at the end. From a shadowy jailer to a family man who was in the right place at the right time; his whole life was transformed. And this reader's expectations were blessedly shattered.

Pumpkins and prison guards. The least likely, unexpected, uninvited characters in our lives, in our own stories, become the most important. They become the source of transformation, or the transformation itself.