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| My baby Ruth's Easter bucket with a wind-up sheep and chocolates |
If you have a beloved lamp (or several) in disrepair, I recommend the Village Lamp Shop just north of downtown Rochester. East of the traffic light by the Dairy Queen on Romeo Road, look left for a yellow house with “139” painted white on a brown awning shading the front entrance.
FYI, you’ve missed
the shop if you reach the fork of Parkdale and Romeo Roads.
Now, two things:
the window on the shop’s left says “GIFT SHOP”, and that’s no exaggeration. Once
the brothers and experts with lamp restoration have taken care of your problems,
browse the most original shop I’ve had the pleasure to enter.
That’s if you
appreciate antiques and recycled castaways transformed into art, and that’s
using the term broadly.
I never fail to find gifts, useful and quirky,
some less than $10, and most above. I promise you will smile within minutes,
amused at the variety of oddities.
When I dropped off
two abused pole lamps several weeks ago, a little basket of white, wooly sheep
with darling faces caught my eye. I picked up a sheep to discover a windup key
on its side.
“Bless my soul,” I
whispered. For I’d recently read a book titled “A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23” wherein
W. Philip Keller, a shepherd, illuminates God’s relationship with us, His sheep.
I’m ever grateful
for the friend who gifted me the book, a woman with eyes to see what people
need. In the pocket-sized masterpiece, Keller ruminates the twelve parts of King
David’s shepherd song as I’ve never read or heard it preached before.
In his progression
from “The Lord is my shepherd” to the final “I will dwell in the house of the
Lord forever” is the fifth promise, “He restores my soul.”
When a child
memorizing this psalm for Sunday school class, I related “He restores my soul”
to God’s forgiveness of my sins—washing my heart, mind, and spirit whiter than
snow.
At age twelve, a
tragic family event separated me from my Sunday school class and church
services—and Pioneer Girls on Friday nights where my teacher placed my first
Bible into my hands.
From that day when
cast down, separated from my Bible teachers and fellow students, I couldn’t
comprehend my Shepherd daily restored my distressed soul with His promises
hidden within my heart.
Five years later,
one marvelous day after cheerleading practice, a friend who needed her soul
restored as much as I, asked, “Iris, would you like me to pick you up for Sunday
school this Sunday?”
The Lord is our
Shepherd, we shall not want. He makes us to lie down in green pastures. He
leads us beside still waters. He restores our soul.
Dear Reader, I
bought a wind-up sheep for my book giver and daughters.
“How cute!” they
said.
We watched the
sheep turn in circles as their dogs sniffed the odd little creature.
As Philip Keller says,
“We may rest assured that our Shepherd will never ask us to face more than we
can stand.”
