"Decisions"

 

Christmas poses many options.  There are places to shop, parties to hop, and resolutions to stop.  There are presents to buy, people to shy, and old friends to send a card to say hi.

Speaking of old friends, the week after Thanksgiving in 2006 the Bethel Baptist Chain Saw Team did some ministry in New Orleans.  It was a very fruitful week making new friends with some of the survivors of Katrina as we ministered to them by cutting dead trees from their yards and driveways.

While there, we worked under the direction of a “Blue Hat” which with the North American Mission Board is the person that supervised our team.  Our “Blue Hat” was an old friend from up home.

I remember back in 1984 a mission trip that he and I ministered together.  We traveled to Baxter Springs, Kansas to help a church build a bigger sanctuary.  It had been an adventurous trip out having taken a couple of wrong turns, mostly before we left the state of Alabama.

Traveling in caravan of a car, new Chevy pickup, and church van, we started home after a good week of work.  The car and church van had CB radios, but the pickup did not.  The car ran lead and the church van pulled up the rear.

Somewhere around Springfield, Missouri, a new route home, we were traveling down the interstate when someone in the lead car yelled over the CB, “Right turn, right turn, right turn” and quickly moved from the left lane to the exit ramp.

I was driving the church van and I did not have time to exit, as did the pickup.  The pickup stopped under the overpass.  I radioed the lead car that the pickup and I missed the turn and told them that I would go to the next exit and would catch them.  The next exit was seven miles.  Those in the car wanted to know where the pickup truck was.  Here is what happened.

Not having any form of communication, the three in the pickup were in a panic.  My friend, the “Blue Hat,” was a college professor and very analytical.  His companions were carpenters who had never been out of Alabama and, in a fluster; they wanted to know what they were going to do.

My friend responded this way.  “We have three options.  We can back up the interstate, go up the off ramp, or we can catch the van.”  At that moment, the 454 cubic inch engine in the new Chevy screamed and roared like a jet plane taking off.

I had communicated to the car that I would wait on the pickup.  At the next exit, I waited.  I heard it before I saw it.  It sounded alike a jet plane.  I stood on the interstate and flagged them down and when they landed, I asked how fast they were going.  The driver said, “Over a hundred.”

The car traveled at a slow pace and we caught them after we got their location and we continued our journey home on a new route.

When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.  And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.  And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.  (Matthew 2:10-12 KJV).

This Christmas will present many options.  Let us seek the one for whom we celebrate Christmas and follow the Lord’s directions for our lives.