If you are standing in line to vote this Tuesday 2020, good for you Citizen. We posted this blog for you to read while you waited your turn.
This Texan voted by mail from Indiana, but I still remember what Stanley Shipp taught me. I scribbled notes for this epistle on the back of an old receipt I found in the car ashtray. I was waiting for the driver to return with groceries. Forgot to bring my iPhone. Twiddled my thumbs.
Then I remembered what Stanley told me about standing in line at a village post office in Switzerland.
Shipp was a preacher who came from Lueders, Texas—near Stamford, west of Abilene Christian College. He married his classmate Marie in 1946, and after graduation they went to Switzerland as missionaries.
Stanley found that when he went to the village post office— where you mailed and picked up letters, made telephone calls, signed documents—he always found himself waiting in a line.
“I decided to not let the post office rob me of my time. So I talked to people in line with me. Practiced my French. Conversed with those who might want to be converted. Brought my clipboard, wrote letters. Made sermon notes.”
When the driver returned with groceries, I asked Delia about her years in Romania before she became an American citizen. “Were there lines at the Romanian post offices like Stanley described in Switzerland?”
She answered. “Oh, yes. But that was before everyone got cell phones.”
Photo by Andrey Popov at Shutterstock
