Roads

Jason accused me recently of being a glass-half-empty kind of person when I flinched and squealed from the passenger seat because the gigantic semi truck next to us was coming way over the line.  "Look on the bright side--the truck is half in the other lane."

[It wasn't the only car-related alarm recently; I was driving one day when a small voice from the back seat said, "Um, I have a situation..."  I turned around to see my small child with the neighboring seat's seat belt looped around said child's neck like a noose, being gingerly held with two hands to preserve the little slack still left.  

These are situations where with all your might you just want to know WHY, but the time is not appropriate to ask probing questions.  Nor is it appropriate or necessary to deliver the indignant, wisdom-imparting lecture once the trembling child has been extricated from his or her self-made hazardous predicament.  We've been here before.  Sometimes one memorable experience really is the best teacher of wisdom to our children.]

Apropos my last post, we were surviving the errant semi truck on the highway because we were on our way to my brother's ordination weekend.  

My brother, my brother--whom I've known all my life, who alternately played with me and tormented me as kids, who wore a perpetual scowl when he had to take me to high school every day, who went off to college and met Jesus and subsequently persuaded me to join him there and threw me a surprise 18th-birthday party with all his friends on freshman move-in weekend so I would have some friends, who was my friend throughout college minus the tormenting, who eventually, sadly, moved out of town--is now a PCA pastor.

I'm so glad I got to be there.

Coming fresh off my weekend retreat where I pondered Jesus' words of life and the determination some old friends have made to turn away from them, I watched my brother make holy vows to serve the Lord and His church as pastor, and listened to what his shepherding and examination elders had to say about him, and I wept.  

How is it that some believing friends have wandered away, and here is my brother, and me, and various others I know--in the same circles twenty years ago--all these years later, still pressing in to Christ?  

I saw clearly, sitting in that church service, the divergent paths we have taken, all of us seeking the good life, and I wept for God's persevering mercy on my brother, and on me. 

Photo by Fahrul Azmi on Unsplash