Following

      I’ve been thinking a lot about snowplows this week.

      Mostly because I’ve been behind snowplows a lot this week!  Mostly on Route 79 coming over to the church in the mornings.  With the curves and the hills on 79, there are not a lot of good places to get around a plow, so we can end up following plows for quite some time, and a preacher’s bored mind might turn toward analogies…

      Snowplows clear roads in bad weather so we can get where we want to go.  Most times they are a minor delay, and we are happy to follow along because the benefits of unimpeded travel are greater than the inconvenience.

      When the snow is accumulating (like right now outside the church), we generally like to follow a plow since it moves the depth aside and gives us passable pavement.  Mind you, it may not be perfectly clear, and there may be ruts, and there may stripes of snow and ice and slush between the bare tire tracks, but we can travel well enough.

      Sometimes along the Thruway or major road a couple of plows will pair up and the first one will clear the left lane into the right lane where the second one kicks it all to the shoulder.  Someone told me about interstates out West where a flying wedge of up to four plows would power along at fifty, which, of course, made some drivers who wanted to do 65 in the snow chafe a bit.  It also could get awkward for the drivers ahead of the flight of plows who are doing 30 in the deep stuff as the trucks overtake them!

      Mostly we tolerate snowplows leading us.  It gets a bit different when the roads are only kinda bad and the plow is really slow, and we are in a hurry.  We get impatient then.  That’s when I typically see a big Ram or F-150 pickup blast past the plow as if the driver knows better than the plow operator what’s ahead.  But I suspect that the uncleared path ahead is not all that safe or speedy anyway, and often enough the impatient vehicle only gains a few minutes for all the white-knuckle driving.

      How often do we grumble about the snow kicked into our driveways, forgetting that the plow has made travelling through life safer for other people?

      So as a pickup raced past me and a couple of cars behind the flashing lights of the state plow today, I mentally swapped “Holy Spirit” for “snowplow.”  How often we are not content to let God’s Spirit clear the way before us and wait patiently for improved travelling through our lives?  How often we blast ahead only to discover that breaking through the drifts on our own is harder and tenser than letting the leader lead?

      Conversely, how often do we think self-centeredly that the plow or the Spirit will give us perfectly smooth and clear routes through life even while the storms are still roaring?  Sometimes just getting life’s impediments down to clear-ish tracks through the ruts of ice and hardship and confusion is enough to get us safely there, despite the forces against us.

      How often do we see the flashing safety lights from God as delays instead of warnings that worse is ahead if we don’t slow down and follow?  When things are mostly good, yeah, we may rush ahead, but when life gets stormy, I’m glad I can settle in behind the Holy Spirit and follow safely.

                                                                                                            In Christ,
                                                                                                       
                                                                                                             David
               
                                                                                               

Texts For Sunday Worship:
       From the Hebrew Bible         1 Samuel 3:1-20
      From the Gospels                  John 1:43-51