The Bungee Cord. 10-26-25

Hello,

Just got back from spending a week with some friends at the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They had rented a house on the beach and invited us to come down and enjoy it with them. What a treat!

It is about 8-9 hours from our house to the house in which we stayed. Last Sunday, we left after church, so we broke the trip in half. On the way home we tackled the trip in drive. Normally, when Kate and I go on vacation, I do most of the driving as I don’t entertain myself very well as a passenger. However, since we did not take our car, but travelled in a friend’ car, I was assigned to the back seat for the entirety of the trip. It was reminiscent of childhood car trips back to see my grandparents in Wayne, Nebraska. Oblivious to the amount of road that we had travelled and the road yet to travel, I, on several occasions mimicked to the front seat my childhood wonderings, “How much longer?”

This upcoming Sunday is All Saints Sunday in churches that follow a liturgical calendar. On All Saints Sunday we commemorate those who have been Baptized this year and have begun their journey of faith, and we commemorate those who have reached faith’s end and rest in God’s eternal care. For those of us in between these two groups, we are like back seat riders, not knowing how far we have yet to go, and with the wonderment of a back seat child we might find ourselves asking, “How much longer?”

Of course, the ride is not the same for all of us travelers. Personally, I have had legs of this life’s trip that have been so darkly shrouded in depression, that my back seat question comes with eager anticipation. “How much longer?” I have been with people for whom the trip seems to lack any purpose, and they find themselves asking their back seat question out of abject boredom. “How much longer?” For most people that I have ridden with in this life’s trip, the trip in and of itself is so filled with wonder, joy, and awe that their back seat question hopes for an answer that carries much time with it. “How much longer?”

“Twenty minutes.” That was the designated answer that came from the driver’s seat of the car in which my wife and her siblings traveled. “Twenty minutes.” As you have probably guessed, in reality, it never was twenty minutes, but it gave the unbuckled travelers in the back seat and in the travelers in the “way back” of the station wagon the message that they needed to find something with which to occupy themselves. I remember that we would play “Alphabet Find”, where we would search for sequential letters of the alphabet as we traveled along, and once someone found a letter, no one else could use that sign, license plate, or advertisement to procure the letter they were on. “Q’s” were a challenge to find!

“Twenty minutes.” That might be a good answer for all of us as we turn the corner on this year’s All Saints Day. As much as All Saints Day is a day to commemorate new and deceased travelers, it is also a day to poke our heads out the window and use this time constructively: feed the poor, attend to the sick, visit the imprisoned, lift up the widow and orphan, welcome the stranger, love one’s neighbor….. “Twenty minutes.”

Who knows how long “twenty minutes’’ is going to be, but of this we can be certain: because of who the driver is (Jesus), we’ll get there! And when we get there, we’ll all say with glee, “It was worth the trip!”

Have a great week,

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger