Devotion of the Week
Feb. 1, 2004
By: Hugh Webb, Pastor
Lynch United Methodist Church
Lynch. Ky.

Book of Romans: 8:28. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.

You know that the promise the Christian rests upon, is that all things, even if they are untoward and unexpected, will work together for good. When the scriptures says all things, it means good or bad, prosperity and poverty, bright and dark, sweet and bitter, easy and hard, health and sickness, comfort and suffering, life and death.

"are working together for good", now this is a causative statement, what it means is that God is working all things, there are no accidents. What we call accidents whether it be of a physical nature or circumstantial, there is our ever present God ruling and over ruling.

In 1936 a train pulled out of the Great Northern RR station at Ft. Benton, Montana. In the trains baggage car was the casketed body of a man, who over the years had been the care taker at the Montana School for Deaf and Blind. This man was a Christian man who had a great love for the kids in this school. He gave of everything he had even though he was near the poverty level himself. His every concern was for these handicapped children and he spent many hours in prayer that they might have the things that other children of better means had access to.

Well this man had died, and his body was being taken many hundreds of miles away for burial. It was a raw, wintry blustery day. But there was only one mourner at the station to see him off. His big shaggy, mixed breed Collie dog. As the train pulled away, the big sheep dog stood watching, and then he laid down between the tracks. That night he burrowed under the station platform to await his master’s return.

For five and half years, "Shep" as the station employees affectionately called him, kept a lonely vigil. He met the four trains that stopped at Ft. Benton each day, he eyed every departing passenger and sniffed at the doors of the baggage cars.Station agents fed Shep scraps from home, but he never ate until the last train of the day had departed. As the years went by, Shep grew more and more feeble. Railroad employees made a warm place for him to sleep in the freight shed. But each day Shep hobbled out to meet each train. Finally his hearing and eyesight drew dim, and then on a bitter cold Montana January morning, Shep met his last train. He tried to cross in from of the 10:17, but his aging legs were just too slow, the rumbling, hissing locomotive struck and killed the faithful Shep.

Shep was buried on a bluff overlooking the station, and the story could have ended there, but it didn’t. When the wire services picked up the story of Shep’s loyalty and devotion to his dead master, contributions began to pour in to Ft. Bventon from all over the world. It was decided that the money should go into a special fund to buy spirit-buoying mini-luxuries, such as toys, and warm beautiful clothing, things that the state of Montana could not furnish. For the boys and girls at the Montana School for the Deaf and Blind and because of the Shep fund. Literally hundreds of tragically handicapped children were lifted from the depths of self-pit and despair.Shep was loyal, sometimes it seems that dogs have a built in instinct put there by our Creator to teach us humans humility. Yes all things work together for good to them that love God".