Devotion of 26 April 2018, in the eNews of First Christian Church of Hampton VA. Posted to blog in 2020, during upgrade. The (mis)adventures we live through on the path to wisdom… even as those first disciples.
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LETTER TO THE ROMANS 3:23-24 (New Revised Standard Version)
…all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
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A Word from the Pastor
It was a decent-sized raft, fashioned from “logs” of fresh-cut trees that were of three to 5 inches in diameter. Lashed together with rope, my brother Wendell and I had shoved off into the deeper water of the pond. Using long poles, we made our way to the center, just as we noticed the raft was starting to pull apart and the poles weren’t reaching the bottom.
It seems those “granny knots” and such were no match for the water and the movement! Extending arms into the black water to extend the poles, we found traction, finally more.
Pushing quickly, we made it to an embankment and jumped to land as the logs floated apart. Our raft was no more. Green wood and poor rope work do not make a good raft, a pole will only reach the bottom of the pond when it is long enough to do so, and shore always seems really far away when you are in trouble. I remember these things, and also that all of seven, it would be another four years before I learned to swim.
For my siblings and I, such stories are swapped and usually a new one is revealed when we are together. In the retelling, we laugh, we cry, we remember, we celebrate. They tighten our bonds as family, and life lessons learned.
I imagine the disciples of Jesus must have held similar retellings when they got together, recounting some of the stupid stuff they did, while they wandered Judea and Galilee with our Lord. I find it of comfort that those people of God, men and women, disciples who knew Jesus in the flesh – allowed their own humanity to be reflected in the Word, weaving spiritually edifying tales of their foolishness and redemption into the Gospels. Disciples have a way of allowing their experiences to be “teaching moments” for others, after all.
And so we notice how the grace of God is operative in those moments, and how God uses fallible, imperfect human beings to be the bearers of his message down the centuries. It really is remarkable.
God uses ordinary people and ordinary fallibility to be a part of His story of grace, in Jesus Christ. In His Word. In our lives.
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It was a couple decades before our mother learned about our misadventure and near drowning on that Spring day in the state of Oregon. It was probably a good thing also that Mom didn’t know about the dynamite that Wendell detonated in a corn field some two years later, when we lived in NC. The last thing Mom always did at night, was to pray for us kids’ safety and well-being. She had good cause and was good at it, obviously!
©2018 by Vinson W. Miller, Hampton VA.
Sea & Anchor 