The Bungee Cord 7-31-17

Hello,

     It’s not a big deal when your cell phone dies?  Is it?

     It is when you are driving to Brooklyn to visit your son, and you have no idea where you are going because you are trusting on the GPS in your cell phone to get you there.

     That is what happened last week when I was on my way from Baltimore after visiting a friend to Brooklyn to visit my son.  About 20 miles out of Baltimore my cell phone warned me that it was on its last legs.  I had been having problems with it taking a charge, a problem that was about to become a bigger problem as I was hemmed in thick traffic on I95, traffic that would be going 80mph one minute and then standing still the next.  Of course, the simple answer would be to call my son and have him guide me in….but….not only was my cell phone dead, I don’t know anyone’s telephone number….they are all in my phone’s contacts.

      I decided that my only chance was old school, so I stopped at a rest stop and dug into my trunk and found an old atlas and began looking for New York City in hopes that I could follow the map to my son’s place, whose address I had also forgotten, but whose street name was miraculously in my foggy memory.  I came upon a map of New York City, located Brooklyn and started hunting for the street…..and I couldn’t find it, apparently my map only listed the “important” streets.

     I had been to my son’s place a couple of times, so I decided that I would have to trust my memory.   I remembered that I had made a quick right exit when I had come off the bridge into Brooklyn, and with memory, I hopped back into my car and hoped for the best.  I95….I278…traverse a couple of bridges, and there I was, in Brooklyn….and…as I had remembered, there was an exit just after I got off the bridge!  Unfortunately, the buildings were not the ones that I remembered at that exit, so I thought maybe I had misremembered how close the exit was, so I proceeded to the next….which didn’t look right either.  Fearing that I may have gone too far, I decided to get off, anyway, and I wound up in a neighborhood that was clearly not the one I was looking for.  Back to the interstate….which was a bit of an adventure ….to try another exit…and another, but neither was anything close to familiar in looks.  As I hopped back onto the interstate, I found myself coming upon another bridge….uh oh…that was clearly not where I wanted to be, so I got off and decided that maybe if I just drove around, I might stumble on my son’s street.  Right!  After about an hour of blind driving…and wondering if I would ever locate my destination…and figuring that by now, my son was wondering if something had happened to me….I came upon a stopped ambulance that fortunately was not busy saving someone’s life.

     Bringing my map with me, I walked up to the ambulance and asked the medics, “Can you show me where Gold Street is?”  They couldn’t find it either, so the driver started to rattle off directions to get me there, naming streets and turns.  “I’m sorry.  I won’t be able to remember those directions.  Could you just write them down on this map?”

     “No,” he said, “I’ll just write them on a rubber glove,” and he did.  So, with rubber glove in hand, I wove my way through Brooklyn…not knowing where I was going….and a wave of peace and joy came over me when I found myself at my son’s apartment building.

     All this brought Psalm 121 to my mind.

Psalm 121
¹ I lift up my eyes to the hills—
   from where will my help come?
² My help comes from the Lord,
   who made heaven and earth. 

³ He will not let your foot be moved;
   he who keeps you will not slumber.
⁴ He who keeps Israel
   will neither slumber nor sleep. 

⁵ The Lord is your keeper;
   the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
⁶ The sun shall not strike you by day,
   nor the moon by night. 

⁷ The Lord will keep you from all evil;
   he will keep your life.
⁸ The Lord will keep
   your going out and your coming in
   from this time on and for evermore.

     This mis-adventure was a reminder to me that things human made (phones, governments, relationships, and the like) are often great and wonderful and certainly well worth having, but they are always prone to breaking, running out of steam, and letting me down.  So, as I wander through life, I am thankful that there is one upon whom I can always count on to lead me through….through times of great confusion, through times of boundless despair, through times of glaring joy, and even through the gates of death.

     As I have come to understand God, I would not say that those firefighters were divinely placed there to rescue me.  I would say that they were simply there doing their job, being the hands and feet of God in every thing that they do. (Just like all of us are.)  But I would say this: I lived through a parable akin to those Jesus told, a parable that makes it all too clear to me that to place all my trust in things made of human hands is far less wise than to trustingly place myself in the hands of God.

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger