Forty two years ago I lost my health.  I say that to say this.  We had to have help.  Four children were a full time job and I could no longer do much of anything.  So we sucked it up financially and hired a lady to help us once a week.  She was sent by God himself.  A farm woman with three boys. Three years later when I was starting to function again, Ken didn't want me to let her go.  So year by year she stayed and helped us raise our children.  Looking back, I don't know how she did all the work she did.

But as the years went by, she couldn't do it all anymore.  So I bought her a self-propelled vacuum sweeper that pulled her around.  She was blind in one eye and slowly lost her sight in the other.  She would iron by holding one hand on the board as she guided the other.  Yes, there were a few burned shirts.  She wanted to work so bad.  What was I going to do?  She had grown old and  all the other people that she worked for had let her go.  He husband had died and her boys had left.  She had never learned to drive so she was lonely.  I would go out in the country every week and get her and then take her home.  I cut her hours one by one each year (not her income) because she was wearing out even though she insisted she wasn't.

Last year, at the age of ninety-four,  she broke her leg.  When I go to see her in the nursing home, she asks me to take her home.  "Who is doing your ironing?" she will ask.   "I don't tell her that everything is perma-press and hasn't needed to be ironed for years.  I don't tell her that for the last few years I've had another woman because as long as Leota felt like she was useful, she was happy.  She had memorized my furniture's curves over the years and even though she couldn't see what she was doing very well, she would dust by the shape of the wood, carefully removing knick-knacks and putting them back exactly where they went.  She was an inspiration.  She is an angel.

Hebrews 13:2  "Don't be forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."