Cinderella and Grace

As a full time student at HBU, Ann was required to attend chapel once a week.  They brought in some of the best known speakers in the Southern Baptist faith community.   One day the guest speaker was a man who served a church in Hereford, Texas.    He explained how he got to Hereford.   According to him, Baptist preachers were sent there for disciplinary purposes.  He proceeded to skewer his own faith community with gentle humor.   If he had been sent to Hereford for disciplinary reasons, he probably got further demoted after speaking to the students at Houston Baptist.  He went over big with the students, but I don’t know how well he went over with the administration.  

Having thoroughly entertained his audience, he closed with an illustration on grace that I have frequently borrowed.

 He told the story of Cinderella and described her shameful treatment at the hands of her step mother and the ugly step sisters.  Then she got a visit from the fairy godmother – Well you know what happened next.  At the midnight hour, her coach became a pumpkin and Cinderella returned to her poverty and mistreatment, but of course dropped her glass slipper on the way, and somehow it didn’t morph back into something else.   The handsome prince immediately launched a kingdom wide search for the girl who wore the glass slipper.  He arrived at Cinderella’s home only to find that the shoe wouldn’t fit the privileged occupants.  Of course the tyrannical step-mother and her ugly daughters were crossed off his list.  So asked, if there were any other maidens in the home.  Reluctantly, they took him to Cinderella.  He kneeled on the floor, put the glass slipper on her foot and it was a perfect fit.   Of course he married Cinderella and they lived happily ever after.  The preacher closed his message by saying, “Young people, that’s grace.”  Of course told he told it much more eloquently than I’ve related it here, and I told it after hearing is second hand, but I’ve never forgotten it.

Ann finished out the year at HBU, and then we moved to Iowa where she received the rest of her college education at Mount Mercy College – a Catholic institution, but that story will have to wait.