"The Lord does not look at the things man looks at.
Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."
I Samuel 16:7b

Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns-Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to out patients at the clinic.
One summer evening as I was fixing supper there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man, "Why, he's hardly taller than my eight year old," I thought, as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body. But the appalling thing was his face - lopsided from swelling, and it was red and raw.
Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, "Good evening. I've come to see if you've a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there's no bus till morning." He told me he'd been hunting for a room since noon but with no success, no one seemed to have a room.
"I guess it's my face. I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments..." For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: "I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning." I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch.
I went inside and finished getting supper. When we were ready, I asked the old man if he would join us. "No thank you. I have plenty." And he held up a brown paper bag.
When I had finished dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with him a few minutes. It didn't take long to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into the tiny body. He told me he fished for a living and supported his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury. He didn't tell it by way of complaint: in fact, he thanked God that his disease did not cause him pain and that he had the strength to do what had to be done. The next morning he refused breakfast but asked if he could stay when he had another treatment. "Your children make me feel at home, they don't mind my face."
On the next trip he arrived with a large fish and a quart of beautiful oysters. He said they were fresh because he had shucked them that morning. Since his bus left at 4:00am, I wondered when he had slept. In the years he came to stay overnight there was never a time when he did not bring us some of his bounty.
Some of the neighbors couldn't understand why we kept that "awful looking man." I would turn away, thinking that if they had only given him a chance and learned to know him; they would have learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude to God.

Recently, I was visiting a friend who has a greenhouse. As she showed me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms. But to my surprise, it was growing in an old dented, rusty bucket. I thought to myself, "If this were my plant, I'd put it in the loveliest container I had!" My friend changed my mind. "I ran short of pots," she explained, "and knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn't mind starting out in this old pail. It's just a little while, till I can put it out in the main garden." She must have wondered why I laughed so delightfully, but I was imagining just such a scene in heaven. "Here's an especially beautiful one," God might have said when He came to the soul of the sweet old fisherman. "He won't mind starting in this small body."

All this happened long ago - - and now in God's garden, how tall this lovely soul must stand.