It was a beautiful recently opened affordable housing facility located on Martin Luther King Drive in Portland, Oregon that looked like a Marriott Courtyard.
It had been a very busy and challenging site visit and I decided to get away for a little while. There was a new piano given to the facility as a gift sitting at the front of the dining room. This was a special piano that could be played as a regular piano but also had the capability to incorporate a number of other musical instruments.
So I sat down and began to play. Somehow I got fixated on playing Amazing Grace and played a variety of impromptu arrangements utilizing different instruments (violin, trumpet, etc.) each time I played.
When I got up to leave, I noticed a lady sitting in the back of the dining room. I immediately went up to her and told her that if I would have known she was in the room, I would have played a variety of songs.
She had a tear in her eye as she told me how much this time of music had meant to her. In talking with her, I learned that she was a senior adult orphan. She had no family and had no close friends who were concerned about her, were watching out for her or even had an interest in her.
She had been living day by day and moment by moment in a small room in down town Portland as part of a building that provided bare bones daily lodging and meals to those in need. But that was it.
One day, she had been put in a taxi cab and dropped off at our community. She qualified for Medicaid and was immediately assigned her own room on the fifth floor
“I’ve never lived like this in my entire life. The meals are wonderful. I have my own room with a view. The staff and volunteers really care and are like family to me. And I just got to hear this wonderful “concert.” I feel like a queen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
I never in my wildest imagination thought I was giving a concert. It is absolutely amazing to me how our wonderful Lord takes ordinary events of life and turns them into something that is greater than we could ever ask, think or imagine.