A Matter of Obedience

Tom Riley arrives late to a Sunday school class he never expected to teach. The regular teacher has come down with the flu, so Tom has been asked to fill in, and the note she left says the children have been studying obedience to God. When he asks what they have learned, eleven-year-old Reynold recites two Greek words and their meanings, perfectly and at length. Tom is impressed, but he wants something a little more practical, and nobody in the room can give him an example. So he decides to tell a story instead - something that happened to him back in the 1930s, when he was about their age.

Tom's father is a country doctor who spends his days riding out to farmhouses. One Saturday, with Tom's mother away visiting her sick mother, an urgent phone call sends the doctor racing to the hospital, which leaves nobody to carry medicine to a woman who lives on the far side of the woods and has been very ill. He asks Tom and his younger sister Becky to make the delivery, and he gives them careful instructions: pack a knapsack of food, stay on the single path no matter what, be polite to strangers but keep moving, no playing around, and go to the house with the blue door and say whose children they are. He also tells Tom to bring his pocket knife.

Tom means to obey. But halfway through the woods he cannot resist showing off on a bridge rail, and the knapsack tumbles into the stream. Hours later, with both of them aching from hunger, a friendly man on the path offers food and a shortcut down a different trail. Becky holds her brother to their father's rules, and Tom reluctantly walks on. At the end of the woods, though, he sees a house with a red door and smells supper cooking, and he knocks anyway. The owner, Agatha, mistakes the two of them for the children who have been raiding her garden and locks them in her basement.

Trapped, Tom finally admits the whole mess is his fault and apologizes to his sister. Then an idea comes: using a page from Becky's book and his pocket knife, he slides the paper under the door, pushes the key out of the lock, and pulls it through to their side. Over the next hill they find the blue door at last, where Mr. Kennedy has been waiting for hours. He drives them by wagon to deliver the medicine, and there they meet Agatha again - and she learns, to her horror, exactly whose children she has shut in her cellar.

Back in the Sunday school room, Tom draws the lesson plainly. Obedience matters even when it is inconvenient, even when the reason is not clear, and even when you would rather do something else. His father knew what was best, and God knows better still. Reynold, of course, has one more question about Greek.