Beth and I drove to Lexington last night, gathering there at the airport with all three daughters and several others, husbands, grandchildren, to meet the second oldest grandson’s flight. Twenty years old, he and another fellow his age have spent the last five weeks in Honduras, visiting an orphanage previously known on a church mission trip. Different circumstances were involved this time, both on their own in this day and age. Believing that God was dealing with his heart, mom and dad permitted the trip. Modern technology kept the family in touch; but oh how relieved and happy we were to see him home safe. In June of 1960, this old man was eighteen, flying on a propeller aircraft toward San Diego and all I knew about to be replaced by ten years in the Navy. A year earlier, seventeen and, looking back now, without a mature thought in my brain, I was returning from an adventure accomplished with a buddy of mine, a long half-a-day one-way trip down a two-lane highway to Bowling Green, Kentucky in an old Dodge Desoto for no other purpose than a date with a couple of girls we’d met. Their names, faces, the whole evening is nothing more than blurred memory; but a moment in time occurring in the wee hours of the morning, the two of us no more than twenty minutes or so away from my house, has never left my brain. Jackie was asleep in the seat beside me. Slumber consumed me, held off only by continual repositioning, slapping my own face, just anything and everything thought to keep me going with us this close to completing the journey. I had rolled my window down a crack, hoping the cool air would help. It was probably all that saved our lives. The roar of the big rig’s engine, about to engage my own head-on, penetrated the abyss. My head snapped; my eyes opened; my hands yanked the steering wheel; and you couldn’t have put a sheet of paper between the two vehicles as we passed each other. God was just a word heard in Sunday school as a kid. We wouldn’t “connect” for more than a decade yet to come, this event, though, possibly why I would question my father, just before his death months later, as to his own theological beliefs. Life is a mystery. Christ “in” me doesn’t give me all the answers. Was He there with me from the beginning, keeping me for some purpose? There are at least three other occasions along the way that give me reason to wonder. What I do know is, that having found the oasis and knowing it since as a place, not just to rest and refresh, but where to take all my concerns as well, there is no doubt in my mind of the difference He makes in the next step. I’m grateful for having been able to put all worries about my grandson in His care…….
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