Writer Frederick Buechner tells about his wife's greatgrandfather, a man named George Shinn. Shinn was a pastor back in 1880. He was summoned one midnight to the bedside of an old woman who lived by herself. She had little money and few friends, and she was dying. She told Shinn that she wanted another woman to come stay with her for such time as she might have left, so Shinn and the old woman's doctor struck out in the darkness to try to dig one up for her. It sounds like a parable the way it is told. They knocked at doors and threw pebbles at second story windows. One woman said she couldn't come because she had children. Another said she simply wouldn't know what to do, what to be, in a crisis like that. Another was suspicious of two men prowling around at that hour of night and wouldn't even talk to them. But finally, as the memoir of Dr. Shinn puts it in the prose of another age, "They rapped at the humble door of an Irish woman, the mother of a brood of children. She put her head out of the window. "Who's there?' she said. "And what can you want at this time of night?" They tell her the situation, her warm, Irish heart cannot resist. "Will you come?" "Sure and I'll come, and I'll do the best I can." And she did come," the account ends. "She did the best she could."

This woman was willing. She was available. Is there a warmer word in our language? Available. It means, I'm here when you call. I'm ready, willing, able.

Great crowds were following Jesus. He turned around and said to them: "Anyone who wants to be my follower must love me far more than he does his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, or sisters yes, more than his own life otherwise he cannot be my disciple."

Jesus was asking, "Are you available?"