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Out To Pastor
I will confess that I am crazy, but I didn’t get there by myself. Somebody has been driving me crazy.
I didn’t always know I was crazy until a few years ago The Gracious Mistress of the Parsonage looked at me and said, “Are you crazy or what?”
Reflecting on the past, she was likely correct. I am crazy, but I am not the one behind the wheel driving me crazy.
Our town used to be small and quiet, with not much traffic. We had snowbird traffic in the wintertime, but then the traffic almost died in the summer. I enjoyed those days.
That has changed in the last few years. I can’t tell the difference between snowbird time and summertime. The traffic is just simply crazy.
Almost every day, we hear news of a traffic accident within the scope of our neighborhood.
Last week, we drove across town to our Sunday morning ministry. The traffic was a bit jammed, slower than usual, and some people behind us seemed to be in a hurry. They couldn’t get around us, so they beeped their horns to get us to hurry up.
The more the person behind us blew their horn, the slower The Gracious Mistress of the Parsonage went. I could see that one driver was very anxious and blowing his horn.
Finally, the traffic eased up, and he could drive around us. As he did so, he shook his fist in the air and pointed us toward heaven. He used the wrong finger, but everybody makes mistakes. The Gracious Mistress of the Parsonage looked in his direction and gave him one of her signature smiles.
I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall when he got home.
As for me, I just kept quiet, tried not to smile too much, and pretended I didn’t see what happened.
Driving to our Sunday ministry, I wondered, “Where did she learn that kind of driving?”
I almost blamed it on her father. Then the truth hit me smack in the face like a pie. I was the one who taught her how to drive after we got married. I sighed deeply and thought, “How did I get it all wrong?”
We finished our Sunday morning ministry and were driving back home.
It is very hard to keep quiet around my wife. She seems to know what I’m thinking before I even think it. Halfway home, she glanced at me and said, “What are you thinking?”
This can go either way. Either I get in trouble, or I say nothing.
“Are you thinking,” she finally said, “about the nice service we had this morning?”
Very few times, I have had an open door out of a situation. I smiled at her and said, “I loved your piano playing while we sang hymns this morning. It was wonderful!”
I’m not sure, but I think I dodged a bullet. That doesn’t happen often.
I was reminded of a Bible verse along this line. Ecclesiastes 7:9, “Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools.”
This is seen on highways across town. Why can’t people just rest and not be hasty in their lives? A hasty spirit leads to anger, which never solves any problem.
