Dragging Christmas to the Curb

A man in our neighborhood used to drag his tree down to the street right after his midday feast and just before his afternoon of viewing football.

I thought of this man’s action recently when I read of author Jan Leong's rush to put everything about Christmas in the trash or in the attic as soon as possible:

“Like me, our neighbors had dragged Christmas to the curb.”

Mrs. Leong stuffed her garbage can as full as possible and thought she had — with assistance from her teenage son — successfully dragged Christmas away. But then, her son came dragging a dying potted tree someone had deposited across the street.

Mother and son battled verbally till she recalled he had something of a green thumb. Her energy at low ebb, she agreed to let him keep his newfound treasure —  stipulating that he had to clean up dying needles as they fell from the tree.

The way we “do Christmas,” we feel depleted, physically and emotionally, not to mention financially, and want to forget all the headaches that go with the season. 

But if we can rid ourselves of Christmas by dragging it to the curb, what is Christmas anyway? 

“We’re going to have Christmas early because it’s Sarah’s year to be with her in-laws.”

“Christmas will be late. We have to wait till Sam finishes his tour in Afghanistan.”

“We just can’t do Christmas this year, since Mother died last week.

These explanations equate Christmas with family gatherings, lavish meals, presents, and generally good times together.  Maybe even better with a little snow.

British author Edward Rutherfurd’s historically based novel London describes a holiday celebration in the seventh century that offers us perspectives on Christmas.  

Great excitement mounts as they anticipate lighting the Yule log. They feast on venison and beef and other meats. They enjoy apples, pears, mulberries and other summer fruit they had preserved. They drink morat, from fermented mulberries.

The people in the story expect visitors to come from a distance. These  holiday guests have to be fed and be bedded down on pallets of straw:

These seventh-century scenes from Rutherfurd’s novel have a familiar ring to them.  We associate the Yule log with Christmas.  And any family these days who has prepared for Christmas visitors can recognize the stir of activity in getting food ready and arranging places for their company to sleep. 

But the scene in Rutherfurd’s book is not a Christmas celebration at all.  It is a Yule celebration. 

 Christianity was new to England in the seventh century. These people are pagans. They burn the Yule log when the days grow shorter as a sign of hope for the longer days of spring.

Most of these Londoners in the seventh century have never heard of Jesus.

In modern terms:

You can wrap a mountain of gifts that reach to the ceiling.

You can have decorations that win prizes in the Home Christmas Tour.

You can write enough Christmas cards to fill the nearest post office.

You can cook enough pies and cakes and turkeys to fill a restaurant.

Nothing wrong with any of those things, but if that’s all your Christmas, you probably should drag Christmas to the curb — and the sooner the better.

For most of my life, the 12 Days of Christmas meant simply the partridge in a pear tree along with 12 lords leaping, seven swans swimming, three French hens, and the like. 

Then, not many years ago, I became aware of the church year or liturgical year that encourages us to extend our focus on the birth of Jesus for 12 days instead of one, leading on to the arrival of the Wise Men and also Jesus’s baptism, then on to other events in our Lord's life throughout the year.

Long-time Methodist pastor Ellsworth Kalas reminds us how we tiptoe around what Christmas really is about.  He said:

God is love. “That’s what Christmas is all about.” 

God loved us and sent His Son.  “That’s what Christmas is all about.”

Be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God, for Christ’s sake has forgiven you.  “That’s what Christmas is all about.”

Whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.  “That’s what Christmas is all about.”

How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.  “That’s what Christmas is all about.”

With those thoughts and actions, you will not hurry to drag Christmas to the curb.

Mrs. Leong looked back some 30 years after she tried to keep her teenage son from saving a dying pine tree. When she wrote her story, she had no desire to drag Christmas to the curb. And -- by the way -- her son’s pine tree was still alive.

Jan Leong, “Evergreen,” All is Calm, All is Bright, ed. Cheryl Kirking, Grand Rapids, MI.: Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2001, 2008.

Home for Christmas

Adapted from my Christmas Memories from Seven to Seventy.

I’ll be home for Christmas If only in my dreams. – Kim Gannon and Walter Kent

The call to come home is as old as the human race. In the holiday season, that voice reverberates through the echo chambers of our souls.

Early in life, I learned I was expected to be home for Christmas. So I was with my parents every Christmas for 34 years. In those 34 years, I had graduated from high school, college, and seminary; I had worked full-time as a minister, college professor and writer-editor; I had taken unto myself a wife; I had lived in Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia.

Even after I became a father, for as long as my parents were alive, a strong inner voice silently yelled, “Let’s go to Texas!”  Sometimes that call still comes, though Daddy and Mother and three of our siblings have gone to that Eternal Home, leaving only three brothers.

When Johnny Mathis gives out with “I’ll be home for Christmas; you can count on me,” in my mind’s eye and in my heart of hearts, I am once again part of a happy throng of six brothers and sisters, spouses, and children, overflowing one of the modest houses or apartments Mother and Daddy called home over the years.

I have missed a great deal over the decades by not being around my brothers and sisters and their spouses and oncoming generations. Now, our sons have followed my example as they live and work in New York and Chicago, far from their parents. They have their own individual patterns for the holidays, and I say, “God bless them for it.”

People often ask, “Don’t you wish your sons would come home for Christmas?” I usually just smile or grimace, but I think to myself: “I would love to see them, but they are at home. They’re

away from us, but they have their homes in Chicago and New York.  They have their lives. They have their responsibilities. It isn’t easy to travel long distances, especially with children.”

In “The House of Christmas,” G. K. Chesterton described the call to come home this way:

For men are homesick in their homes, And strangers under the sun,

And they lay their heads in a foreign land Whenever the day is done.

Those lines suggest that every human being is away from home.

The Christmas story is about One who left his Father’s home, who was born in a manger, who in adulthood had no place to lay his head, who was buried in someone else’s tomb, who identified his family as larger than his mother and birth brothers and sisters, a family “born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will  of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

So, whether we are with our human families this Christmas or spending the time alone, we need to listen for the call of God, welcoming us to the warmth of his family. Jesus came to earth to call all his brothers and sisters back to his Father’s house.

A Three-Inch-Tall Jesus?

When I was about twelve years old, the Sears, Roebuck store in Sweetwater featured a real-live Santa Claus who was just three inches tall.

His tiny house sat on a table. Through the picture window, you could see the little man Sears called Kute Kris Kringle.  He sat by the fireplace in his easy chair in his living room with greenery, ornaments, and packages under the tree.

This Tom Thumb-sized Santa would get up and walk around the room, look out, and wave at us.

Most exciting: He had a tiny telephone on a table by his chair, connected with a full-sized phone on the table near his house.  You could pick up the receiver and tell him what to bring you.

Parents would get their kiddos to wave at the Jolly Old Elf.  If the little folks were brave, they could pick up the phone and tell him their hearts’ desires.

Because I had parted company with Old Saint Nick a few years earlier, I tried to figure how Sears, Roebuck managed to get the real-live man to look so small.

Television was still a dream in West Texas in the mid-1940s, so I doubted that Sears had a television studio set up in some remote corner of the store.

I guessed they used the principle of looking through the “wrong end” of a telescope.

One day, I picked up the phone to talk to Santa.  That was OK with him .  .  .  the first time.  When I left the area and came back and called him several more times, the big man behind the three-inch illusion strongly suggested that I find something else to occupy my attention and leave the phone line open for younger boys and girls.

As I think back to Sears shrinking Santa Claus to a manageable size, it occurs to me that we do the same thing with Jesus.  A three-inch tall Savior is much more convenient than the full-sized One on the pages of the New Testament.

The creche on a table in our family room is a bit larger than the Sears house where Santa lived, but the Babe in the table-top cradle may be just about three inches long.  Tree ornaments with cattle stall and figures in it sometimes are reduced to no more than three inches.  So we find ways to keep the whole scene small enough not to worry us.  Then, too, when the season is over, we can pack them all up and get them out of our way without great inconvenience. 

We see other ways --more serious ways -- of keeping Jesus small, beyond confining Him to the creche at Christmas.

Some people shrink Jesus by saying He was a great teacher.  Nothing more. 

Others bring Jesus down to size by denying He performed miracles. When He appeared to be walking on the water, they say, the disciples’ boat was at the shore, so Jesus simply took a few steps over to the vessel.  Or when he supposedly fed several thousand people with a few pieces of bread and fish, here’s what they say really happened: He shamed the crowd into admitting they had brought food with them for the day’s outing, so they took out their hidden food and shared with one another  —  turning it into an outdoor covered-dish luncheon.

With miraculous cures, the Jesus shrinkers say He was a great psychologist who used the power of suggestion to help people recover from psychosomatic ailments.

When it comes to the New Testament’s greatest miracle of all, the resurrection of Jesus, some modern interpreters say his followers wanted so badly for Him to come back, they believed He actually was raised from the dead.  But it makes little sense to suggest daydreams or wishful thinking could have caused the small, insignificant movement to catch fire and grow, even in the face of persecution, imprisonment, and death.  Likewise, if the resurrection was a delusion, how do we explain millions across the centuries whose lives have been transformed morally and spiritually through a fairy tale?  The course of Christianity history cannot be so handily dismissed.     

Some simply dismiss the entire Bible out of hand or rewrite it to suit themselves.  President Thomas Jefferson published his own version of the Gospels: basically Jesus’ teachings but none of the miracles.  The Jefferson Bible ends with Jesus being buried.

As we consider these and other ways people try to shrink Jesus to fit their own specifications, we acknowledge the miracles in the Bible are not based on scientific evidence.   It takes the eye of faith to see Jesus as more than a great teacher, more than a healer of diseases of the mind, but as the One who rose from the dead and brings everlasting life.  

Faith and science need not be seen as mortal enemies.  Many scientists are devout Christians who believe God used the evolutionary process to bring about life on earth, over millions of years, beginning with the simplest one-celled animals and developing all the way to human beings.   These scientists do not believe Jesus must be shrunk in size in order for us to see the validity of the scientific process. 

Science is based on measurable evidence that can be evaluated under the microscope or in laboratory or field experiments. Thus, Christian claims regarding the person of Jesus and the wonders ascribed for Him in the New Testament cannot be examined scientifically.  But this does not mean they did not happen.

We are blessed by countless wonders of science.  In our technological era, we rely on science every day, at every turn, for our health, jobs, transportation, communication, and entertainment.  So followers of Jesus can ill afford to dismiss science.  Neither should scientists attempt to dismiss the realm of faith which lies beyond scientific proof.

Someone offered this distinction: Science explains HOW it all happened, and religion explains WHO  made it happen.  They need not be at war.

Albert Einstein, often considered one of the most brilliant persons who ever lived, said he did not believe in a personal God and referred to himself as agnostic, but he often spoke kindly to people of faith.

I have fewer problems with avowed atheists or agnostics than with professing Christians who seek to whittle Jesus down to size. I have heard internationally famous Bible professors state categorically that certain incidents in the Bible simply did not happen, could not have happened.  They offer no evidence to support these assertions.

Several years ago, a group of scholars formed “the Jesus Seminar,” with the self-assigned task of analyzing all the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Four Gospels to determine which are authentic and which are not.  By their self-declared authority, they grouped the sayings as authentic, questionable, or definitely not from Jesus.  They declared the Fourth Gospel contains no bona fide sayings of Jesus.   This approach doesn’t even leave Jesus three inches tall.

To my thinking, the most significant whittling down of Jesus is described in what we might call Paul's Christmas Story in chapter 2 of Philippians.  He describes Jesus as being in the form of God but leaving that behind for our sakes.  Rather, Jesus did His own whittling as He “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8).  

Charles Wesley, one of Methodism’s founding brothers, in his song, “And Can It Be,” described Jesus’s willingness to lay aside His heavenly perks: 

He left His Father’s throne above
So free, so infinite His grace—
Emptied Himself of all but love,
And bled for Adam’s helpless race.^*

But the Jesus in the Bible Story did not remain in the grave and did not remain in the whittled-down form.  Instead, God the Father restored Him to His full stature:  “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11).

No three-inch Jesus here!

^* Charles Wesley, “And Can It Be,” The Baptist Hymnal.  Nashville, Tenn.: Convention Press, 1991, p. 147.

A Thanksgiving Acrostic

My longtime friend Roger Lovette, retired pastor of First Baptist in Clemson, South Carolina, in his blog, "Head and Heart," recently quoted two lines from a couplet about two men in prison:   

Two men looked out from prison bars—

One saw the mud, the other saw stars.

At Thanksgiving, if things look muddy, I pray you and I will be able to lift our sights from the mud and see the stars. Here is my personal list of reasons for giving thanks:

“T” is for “Today”:

Psalm 118:24 — This is the day which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

It’s the only day we have.   The title character in Broadway’s Mame sings, “It may not be anyone’s birthday, and though it’s far from the first of the year, We know that this very minute has history in it: We’re here!”

“H” is for “Hope”:

Hope looks beyond today. Christian Hope looks beyond this life. One of three abiding virtues, with faith and love.

“A” is for “Ancestors”:

A cousin in Mississippi traced my mother’s family back to the Northampton district of England in 1601 to a man named William Hollowell.  I am in the 12th generation of descendants from Grandfather William Hollowell.  I’m glad someone went to the trouble to trace my origins back that far.

“N” is for “Nourishment”:

When we think of this season, one of the first things we think about is tables of abundant food.  .  .  .  [H]e has not left himself without a witness in doing good—giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy.’ (Acts 14:17).

“K” is for “Kids”:

Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4) and then trust the ultimate outcome to God.

“S” is for “Senses”:

At Thanksgiving, we appreciate smell and taste and touch as we enjoy abundant meals.  We use sight to look at dear friends and relatives, the sense of sound to hear those we call in far-off places. 

G” is for “Grace”:

A word with many meanings:  Describing women, with poise and dignity.  Prayer before meals.  Kindness when a person has done nothing to deserve it — a “Grace Period” for paying a bill or turning in a class report. And don’t forget God’s grace:

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast.

“I” is for “Income”:

Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth .  .  .  (Deuteronomy 8:17-18).

“V” is for “Values”:

Blessed is the man that walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law does he meditate day and night.

Abraham Lincoln spoke of “the better angels of our nature.”

“I” is for “Identity”:

I’m proud of my identity as one of the sons of Travis and Vandelia Webb. I am also proud of my identity as a child of God:

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God (1 John 3).

“N” is for “Nation”:

I love my country, despite our many prejudices and inequalities. 

Someone said, “My country — right or wrong.” Someone else said, “My country, right or wrong — when wrong, to make her right.”

“G” is for “God”

.  .  .  From whom all blessings flow .  .  .

I Wasn’t So Sure About the Baraca Class

As I began teaching the Baraca Radio Sunday School Class, I wasn't so sure.

I knew of the Baraca broadcast from First Baptist Church almost from the time I came to live in Anderson the first time in 1959, but I had no direct contact until many years later.

To be honest, I harbored suspicion, based on cautions I had heard about big classes that tended to become “churches within a church.” I came to town directly from seminary as co-minister at a neighborhood church, so I had only indirect knowledge of this radio group.

A few years later, after I became a professor at what is now Anderson University, I joined First Baptist. Still, my awareness of the Baraca Class remained hazy.  Pansy and I left Anderson, and I had congregational and writing and editing assignments for more than a decade before returning to the faculty.

Even after coming back to the college and the church, in 1981, Baraca remained on the borders of my awareness.  I heard that a probate judge, Ralph King, taught the class for decades, and later, four men took week-about as teachers each month. 

Then, in 1991, one of the teachers asked me to fill in for him.  I enjoyed the experience — one of the few times I had preached or taught on the radio.  Even so, my suspicions remained. The auditorium in the church’s educational wing seats about two hundred people, and with probably half the seats taken, thoughts of “a church within a church” lingered in my mind.

The next day, one of my faculty colleagues greeted me warmly and said, “I heard you on the radio yesterday when I sat with my homebound mother. She listens to Baraca regularly.”  Soon after that, I heard a similar story from another friend.

My perspective changed dramatically when I realized people regularly rely on the broadcast for spiritual guidance.  Also, I had no evidence for thinking of Baraca as a competitor or a substitute for church services.

Not long after my first lesson, one of regulars dropped out of the lineup, and I filled in again. I soon began teaching once a month, and that pattern continued about a decade, and then the other three teachers asked me to take the assignment every week. Now, I’ve done that for more than fifteen years.

Across the years, we consistently get word from people who listen to the Baraca broadcast, some who can’t go to church and others who simply do not go to church.

Several years ago, after attending a funeral, I stood in the foyer of a church, talking with a friend.  I noticed two women across the way looking intently at me. I thought perhaps I had spoken in their church at some time. 

Finally, one of the women came over and asked me, “Are you Lawrence Webb?”  

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

She said, “I recognized your voice. I listen to the Baraca Class.”

Others have said similar things.  Also, some people who do not attend Sunday school tell me they plan their drive to their churches to coincide with my lesson.

Also, I have done funerals for people who had been unable to go to church.  After a homebound aunt died, nieces who had assisted her during her illness told me that she made everyone in her house sit down and be quiet for the broadcast. 

So there you have a picture of how my association with this eighty-four-year-old radio broadcast began and has continued. I wonder at the many lives we touch.

P. S. Baraca is a Hebrew word for blessing.

We’re on the air 10:00 to 11:00 a. m. Sundays on 107.7 FM and 1280 AM.

Online 24/7 at the Anderson, South Carolina, First Baptist website: www.andersonfbc.org

You can hear the message or read it.

My Little Sister

I made the following remarks at the funeral of my younger sister, the fourth of five siblings who grew up together in and around Sweetwater, Texas, in the 1940s.

Lois Marie Webb Way

November 4, 1936 – November 11, 2017

Cleburne, Texas

She turned boys’ heads.

They stopped and looked when she walked by.

One night she went to a movie with our older brother Lee Roy and me.

As we stood on the sidewalk in front of the Texas Theater in Sweetwater, waiting for the earlier show to let out, some guys we knew started saying, “How did you luck out and get her to go out with you? Which one of you is she with?”

“She’s our sister,” Lee Roy said.

The other guys hooted: “Yeah. I bet.”

Another said, “Tell another one.”

“No,” I said. “It’s the truth. She really is our younger sister.”

“She’s young all right. You’re robbing the cradle.”

Of course, she was our little sister, Lois Marie. She was about twelve.  I was fourteen. Lee Roy was eighteen.  We were three of the five of us who grew up together.  Leta Joy at twenty was married.  Leonard Morris was ten and didn’t like to be called the baby of the family. At that age, Mother and Daddy said he was too young to stay out late. He didn’t like that either.

          It would be another twelve years or so before Lewis Ray, the absolute youngest in the family would be born as a surprise to everyone.

All six of us, plus Lloyd Wayne, who died in infancy between Lee Roy and me, had the initial “L” in our first names.

This led some wag to observe, “Your folks sure raised a lot of ‘L,’ didn’t they?”

My siblings and I have maintained that common “L” into adulthood and on into our senior years.  Everyone, that is, except that eye-popping, head-turning Little Sister.

About the time she and Lee Roy and I went to that picture show, Lois Marie began to try to shed “Lois” and become simply “Marie.”  She didn’t want to go through life as just one more in a long line of “L’s.”

A couple of years after that movie outing, as she blossomed further into physical young womanhood, Daddy relented and let her start going out with some of the fellows whose heads continued turning her way.

When she was “fifteen-going-on-sixteen,” a fellow my age named Don got her attention and managed to edge out most of his competitors. By the time he was eighteen and she was nearly sixteen, the contest was over.

In December 1952, Marie Webb became the bride of Airman Donald Jackson Way.

I was puzzled – No. Let’s say, “stunned.” –  that Daddy signed the license and that Mother went along with it.  When I asked her, “Why,” she said, ”They were going to get married, with or without our permission.  So I got Travis (our Daddy) to agree, as a way to keep peace in the family.”

Some of you have seen Marie and Don’s wedding picture in a frame.  Don in his Air Force uniform and Marie in a neat suit. She wore a hat, the only one I had ever seen her wear, other than the straw hat she had on in the cotton patch when we all were pulling bolls instead of being in school.

Her wedding ensemble also included a clutch purse and the highest heels I had ever seen on any female in our family.

Around the borders of that picture frame, you see the words to Nat “King” Cole’s song, “They Tried to Tell Us We’re Too Young, Too Young to Really Be in Love.”  Also, you see the final lyrics: “And Then Some Day They May Recall, We Were Not Too Young At All.”

We lived to see they were right.  When Don died last year, they had been married a few months over sixty-three years. Now we gather to thank God for the long life of our sister, mother, grandmother, great grandmother, cousin, and friend, a week after many of us gathered on Saturday, November 4, for her eighty-first birthday.

Most of you here today have been closer to Marie,  geographically, than I have. Pansy and I met at seminary in Kentucky and have spent most of our fifty-two years together in the Southeast – all around the Southeast: Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina, as well as some time in New York and Texas.  Our two sons spent most of their growing-up years in Anderson, South Carolina.  But I’m two years older than Marie, so whatever the number of states between us, she has always been and always will be my Little Sister.

Two Scripture passages come to my mind as we celebrate her life and our blessed hope of eternal life through faith in Christ.

In the first chapter of Second Timothy, the Apostle Paul writes to this younger man whom he considers his son in the faith and in the ministry.  Paul gives thanks as he remembers Timothy’s genuine faith, and he looks back across two generations of Timothy’s family line, citing the influence of two godly women – his grandmother named Lois and his mother Eunice.

Paul also is sure Timothy shares this unfeigned faith of these women.  As I think of these three generations, I think of three generations of our family, with two godly women, including a Lois, or Lois Marie. These women were our Mother, Vandelia, and Lois Marie.  And I say to you, Garry Don, Terry, and Greg, I am sure their faith is also in each of you.

Another passage that seems especially appropriate to me today is Psalm 90.

The psalms are songs, and the singer begins here by acknowledging God as the Eternal One Who has been the dwelling place for generations among his ancestors – even before God formed the mountains, the earth, and the world.

As the One Who Inhabits Eternity, God’s time is not our time.  In God’s time, a thousand years pass as quickly as yesterday. Ages come and go as a dream. They are as flimsy as grass, here today and gone tomorrow, so to speak.

Our Great God sees our sins but stands ready to forgive.  As the psalmist thinks of his sinfulness, he thinks again of the shortness of his life in light of God’s eternity. Even a long life passes quickly.

He thinks of seventy years as sort of the standard length.  Not that we have the promise of those seventy years, but in that period, that’s about all a person might expect to live. Then the song says, If you’re extra strong, you may live to be eighty.  But if you do, you’re going to face trouble and sorrow.

Marie reached eighty a year ago, and she experienced pain and sorrow in her final months. In light of these thoughts in Psalm 90, Verse 12 is a key thought: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”  The Apostle Paul expresses the same concern in Ephesians 5: “Redeem the time.  Buy up the time.  Make the most of whatever time you have.”

Then as the psalmist prays for wisdom, he recalls rough spots in his life, he asks God to balance the bad times with good times, to have as many good days as bad.

There’s nothing wrong with that prayer, but we have no guarantee that God will give you that balance.

We see a couple more prayers in Psalm 90. A prayer for the singer’s children: that they will see God’s glory in their lives and that his own works will outlive him, that they will be his lasting legacy.

Garry Don, Terry, and Greg, you know your mother’s loving, prayerful concern for you all through your lives.  You are her legacy.

Finally, I offer a prayer for each of you, each of us, from the Apostle Paul in Ephesians and Philippians:

“That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation of him: The eyes of your understanding being enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of his calling and what the glory of his inheritance in the saints” Ephesians 1:17-18).  .  .   Being confident of this very thing, that he which has begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). Amen.

GOOD SAMARITANS AKA GUARDIAN ANGELS

Disaster often lurks when Pansy and I take a trip, usually in no small part because I fail to tend to details.

Most recently, on our anniversary trip, for example, I didn’t set our first destination point on our GPS before we left home.  But I’ll also try to implicate the mountains of Virginia that often prevented adequate satellite transmission, once we made the connection.

Without the aid of our “eye in the sky,” I made an innocent stop at a McDonald’s, where I often stop for a quick cup of coffee and a potty break.  Returning to the car, I drove in the direction I thought would lead us back to I-77.  That proved to be abysmally wrong.  We wound up in a subdivision somewhere north of Greater Charlotte, North Carolina.

Frantically searching for a place I could readily turn around on a neighborhood street, I suddenly came upon a service truck for a communications company.  Its parking lights were on, and a man sat in the truck.  I pulled ahead of the truck, stopped our blue 2007 Honda Accord and walked toward the white and yellow truck.

I asked the driver if he could tell me how to get back on I-77 toward Statesville.  He tried to give me spoken directions but soon realized I was not taking in all the details.  So he said, “Follow me.  I’ll take you there. “

Long story fairly short, this man drove miles out of the way in order to get us back on our route. When he saw us safe and in the correct lane, he stayed in a different lane and left without my being able to thank him — face to face, at least.

But that’s not the end of the story.  his truck had the familiar question on the back: “How’s my Driving.”  It also had the vehicle ID and a toll free number to call to leave comments.  We followed him for roughly fifteen to twenty minutes, so I got Pansy to jot down that information.

Later in the afternoon, at an Interstate rest area, I called the company and tried to tell our story to the person who answered.  However, she wanted just barebones facts.  I felt frustrated because I didn’t have opportunity to praise this driver.  But then, to my delight, a company official called me back the next day.  He seemed bowled over to get a commendation: People call mainly to complain.  

The company rep gave me this Good Samaritan’s name, Carlos Salgado. He said Señor Salgado would receive a citation on the company’s entire internal communication network, making all his fellow drivers aware of this noble deed.

We arrived in the general area of Roanoke, Virginia, and should have gotten to our hotel well before dark, but in this mountainous region, our GPS worked only intermittently, so we went miles beyond our destination before realizing it.

Our next Guardian Angels were two intelligent, friendly, helpful clerks at a Pilot gas station.  After I explained our situation, they used their company computer and personal smart phones to track down our hotel while I gassed up the car.

These young women could have brushed me off with an indifferent, “I don’t know” or “We’re busy with other customers.”  But they used technology plus their collective knowledge of Greater Roanoke and wrote thorough details of the right route, and we arrived as dark was closing in (Neither of us feels safe driving after dark, any farther than just around our town).

I paid cash for my tank fill-up, and when we got to the hotel room, I found the postal address for the Pilot store on my receipt for the gas.  So I wrote high praise for these energetic, determined, and thoughtful women.

Through our entire stay in Roanoke — not just on our initial arrival — we had difficulty finding our way to the Quality Inn, although we would pass within a block or two of it every time.

Even with the aid of our GPS, we would sail by as we heard the female voice assure us, “You have arrived at your destination on the right.”  The problem arose because the inn is on a frontage road we overlooked repeatedly.

And this brings us to yet another Samaritan on our last night in Roanoke.  After I overshot the hotel a couple of times, I found our way into the parking lot of a Wendy’s fast food restaurant that was very near our lodging.

I got in the line for ordering food, and when I reached the young lady who was taking orders, I asked how to get to the hotel.  She did not live in the area, and she had no idea of how to find the nearby inn.  She called for help from a young management type who also could not tell me exactly.  

Our conversation was civil, but perhaps a bit loud, so others in line or seated nearby heard my questioning.  A fellow senior citizen in the store stepped over and said, “I know exactly how to get there.  You can follow me.”

She and her husband had just returned from the Mayo Clinic in Maryland where he periodically receives treatment for early stages of dementia.  They live near Wendy’s and had stopped in to get the company’s signature Frosty ice cream dessert before going home.

True to her word, this kind lady went with me to our car, greeted Pansy, and told her of the plan. She paced her driving to allow us to stay close behind her all the way into the hotel parking lot.

In these three settings, then, people helped us, people who had no obvious reason, no justification, other than having caring spirits.