I was on a road seldom used. Even worse, on a dead-end, side-road section of that seldom-used road. No one was apt to wander by on a weekend outing.
I didn’t have a shovel or any other tools. Right now, even Annabelle’s big spoon would look pretty good. No, what I had was modern technology: a cell phone. Which at this point was about as helpful as a rotten turnip.
Advice I’ve long heard is that if you’re lost and stranded, stay with your vehicle until help arrives.
Help would arrive . . . when? Who knew I was missing or needed help? Reunion people would have no idea I didn’t reach home safely. Fitz was out on the water with the Miss Nora. I hadn’t mentioned this particular limo job to India.
I might fossilize here before help arrived.
Lord, weren’t you listening? I asked for help, not . . . this!
I circled the limo. It looked the same from the other side. Like something an archeologist might dig up a few thousand years from now. With my bones alongside. A learned archeologist discusses this with his students:
So, what do we have here? A vehicle of indeterminate usage, probably early 21st century. Given the unusual length, perhaps something favored by overweight persons in that era of over-consumption. Bones of a human female. Not young. Bones indicative of a tendency toward jiggly thighs in life. Definitely in need of a hair coloring job.
Okay, I’d sit and wait for a while on the off chance someone did come this way. I got back in the tilted limo. I drank another cup of coffee. I looked in the glove compartment for something edible. I ate a Rollaid. I listened to creaks that sounded like the limo settling ever deeper into its archeological pit. I picked up a radio station from Olympia and another from San Francisco.
This was not working. The limo was beginning to have the ominous feel of an oversized coffin. If someone did come by, it would be out on the road, Blue Creek Road, not on this dead-end side road.
I got out and locked the doors. Right. Like someone was going to sneak up through the brush and make off with my stuck limo or my empty Thermos.
I slogged along the edge of the road, out of the muddy ruts. Which put me directly in the wet brush and stickery blackberry vines. Drops splattered my face and dribbled down my neck. My feet squished in my chauffeur shoes. The air smelled of wet woods and rotting logs, mud and my own damp uniform.
I slipped and fell in a puddle, and, whatever part of me wasn’t already wet and muddy, now was. My chauffeur’s cap fell into the puddle too. I whapped it against my thigh and put it back on my head.
At what I guessed was Blue Creek Road, I sat down on a low stump. What is this, God, punishment for my unsatisfactory attitude of late? Penalty for my doubts and misgivings and uncertainties about some of your people?
No answer. God’s voice didn’t boom out here in the wilderness any more than it did at the espresso stand or Sea-tac or anywhere else. I listened for a still, small voice within, but all I heard was my own jittery heartbeat.
But the rain had let up, and I looked up at treetops lost in a gentle mist. Which might be a rather lovely view, ghostly and mysterious, if I wasn’t wet to the bone and sitting on this soggy stump. Even so, there was that line from Genesis, from the old King James version, which the pastor sometimes liked to quote. A line about a mist rising from the earth and watering the whole face of the ground.
Except for the muddy road leading off in both directions, this could be an earth in the beginning. Mist. Primeval forest. No human beings. I closed my eyes and in spite of the water dribbling down my back felt the wonder of it. I took a breath and smelled the fresh newness of it. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
And back before he even created this world and peopled it with us, he was still God. All- powerful, all-knowing. Everlasting and unchanging.
My eyes flew open as realization hit me like a raindrop the size of a Goodyear blimp.
It didn’t matter if I was on this earth or not, whether or not, in fact, there was a single human being on earth.
God was still God!
And nothing anyone did here on this earth changed that. It didn’t matter how we fell short, what flaws we had, what mistakes we made as Christians or not-Christians, he was still God! Whether the youth pastor did wrong in his relationship with a girl, whether an elder fell short with his drinking problem, whether Janice Morgan gossiped on the prayer chain, whether India’s ex-husband betrayed his position as husband and preacher, whether Fitz’s landlord or car salesman cheated him . . . none of that had anything to do with God’s holiness. Those were our flaws, not his.
Sad, I realized, that sometimes Christians turned people away by their actions. Sad that people who weren’t Christians sometimes couldn’t see beyond the petty mistakes of those who were Christians to the great God beyond. People like India and Fitz – and almost me too. All of us, focusing on people, not on God.
He was God! Far above the flaws of us here on earth, far beyond our limited understanding of him. I didn’t have to understand why Jesus was so hard on that fig tree. I didn’t have to understand each and every passage in the Bible that troubled or confused me. Sometimes the Lord opened my eyes to reveal the truth. Sometimes I stubbornly refused to let my eyes be opened. Sometimes the truth was beyond my limited understanding in my time here on earth. We needed each other here on earth, yes. But the foundation relationship was between God and each of us, between God and me.
Lord, you stranded me out here for a reason, didn’t you? You had to bring me to this place, this misty corner of an empty forest . . . without even a spoon for a tool . . . to get through to me. Forgive me for such a fragile faith, Lord. Forgive me that I viewed you through the flaws of people around me. Forgive me that I could ever doubt you.