Running on the Right Road (print)

The Christian Appeal (May 2001)
Issue Theme: Running on the Right Road

"Running on the Right Road"
by Curtis Shelburne

I love snow. I suppose I’ve always loved the white stuff. Some of my fondest memories of childhood have to do with snowy days at home in Amarillo, Texas. Were the snows there really as deep as I remember? Was I just a lot smaller? Both?

We got great snows in Amarillo. I remember drifts piled high, all the way up to the window of the bedroom my younger brother and I shared. Jim and I soon discovered that opening the window and diving out of the house headlong down the natural snowslide was loads of fun! And I remember one particularly heavy snow when the drifts on each side of our shoveled sidewalk towered a good bit higher than my head. I loved it!

I had a love affair with snow even before I had the wheels and the opportunity to feel that particular joy that comes from crafting a perfect “donut” in the pristine, unmarked snow of an inviting parking lot.

I still love snow (and don’t broadcast this—I still do donuts), but for years I’ve found myself longing for a really good one, a snow like the ones I remember from my childhood. The snows in our little town have been pretty wimpy for the last few years. And one of the problems with growing up is that as we get bigger and taller it takes bigger snows to be as impressive as were the big ones when we were kids.

But we recently had a very impressive snow. A fine snow. A big snow by anybody’s standards. Most of the snow showed up on a Friday evening. (I’ll tell you more about that in a moment.) Saturday morning we woke up absolutely blanketed under the beautiful stuff. Right after lunch a bunch of our church folks and some fine representatives from our neighborhood met at the local elementary school. Big playground. Lots of snow. We had the best snowball fight ever! (Thirty-and-over-year-olds against under-thirty-year-olds. The older folks won, you see, largely because they took the time to count “hits” while the younger folks were too busy throwing snowballs to tally up the ones that were connecting!)
Deliciously tired, my family and I trudged back up the hill to our house. I took one look at the yard. So much snow. So little time. Wonderful wet snow, perfect stuff for snowballs or snow-anythings, so . . . Joshua, our youngest son, and I flew right into some snow artistry. We built a snow dragon, spikes down the back, long twisting tail, knobby skin, proud head held high.

Late that night, I woke up (probably in need of Tylenol), tiptoed into the living room, and peeked out the window. The nighttime world was alive with the calm, beautiful, bluish-white glow of moonbeams on snow. The dragon sat on his haunches in our front yard as if calmly and quietly but strongly guarding our castle (or, at least, our casa). And I was reminded that the Giver of all good blessings, snows included, never sleeps. Not a dragon, he’s the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the One who watches over our “coming and going,” our winters and springs, our snows and our harvests, “both now and forevermore” (Psalm 121:8).
Looking out across that moonlit scene, dragon and all, I paused to thank God for joy, for beauty, for snow, for life here, and for the promise of life hereafter.
When the biggest part of the snow fell on that Friday, my family and I were thirty miles away from home. Along with a large contingent of our fellow citizens, we’d made the thirty-mile trip to help establish once and for all (or at least once and for all for this season) the absolute superiority of our high school basketball teams over the teams of the Cretans (just kidding) to the east. We’d met them on our own turf earlier in the season and dealt with them admirably, I thought, but there’d been a bit of a question (only in their minds, I assure you) about the clock and the final buzzer at the end of a very close game. The video tape vindicated us, but we wanted none of that this time. No questions. Just a massive avalanche-style victory. So there we sat, spooned into a very small gymnasium cheering on the good guys.

The Varsity Girls held up their end of the contest very well indeed. A decisive victory. The Varsity Boys were about to take the court for their own contest.
But the gents who suddenly showed up on the court carrying on quite a discussion were older, balding guys in suits and some fellows in uniform. Officials of one sort or another, school officials and police officers, from both communities.
Oops! I thought. Somebody’s carried the contest outside the gym and we’ve had a battle of another sort. But I was wrong.

What they were discussing was the snow. As we had been sitting in the warm and certainly heated (in every sense) gym, massive amounts of snow had been falling. The cars, the trees, the roads, the world, it seemed, was covered with snow. White as far as you could see. But you couldn’t see far! Visibility, the highway folks informed us, was zero. They wanted to close the highway, but half of our town was still thirty miles from home.

The assembled moguls were getting their heads together to decide what to do. Well, probably what we should have done was to listen to the weather forecast and not make the trip in the first place, but it really had been a deceptively nice afternoon, and the tight schedule really held little room for makeup games . . . And by this time, that cow was pretty much out of the barn anyway. Four periods of basketball were probably not going to make that much difference. Zero visibility is pretty much the bottom of the scale. So we played. (And we won big. Thanks for asking.)

Then we started digging. The cars were out there. We just had to find them. Brushed off, shoveled off, scraped off, the cars were finally queued up, and we headed home. A long series of lights, lined up end to end like a curving luminescent snake, stretched from the defeated village we were abandoning all the way back to the homeland. The snaky procession slithered and slid every inch of those thirty miles at speeds never more than 30 m.p.h. and generally closer to 5 m.p.h. But we arrived home. Victorious.

That was an interesting night. It occurred to me later that part of what I felt that night sprang from the unity of purpose that, along with the massive amounts of snow, enveloped the evening. We’d been united against a common foe, of course. We’d done the job. The athletes, well-trained and finely-tuned physically and mentally, had played their hearts out. The fans, most of them badly in need of even a smidgeon of the kind of exercise taking place before them, had clapped and cheered and hollered idiotic inanities (what fans do, you know), and we had won the victory. Then we’d lined up together to face the cold and the snow.

Together against zero visibility.

Together against winter’s fiercest elements.

Together against a highway department who, though benevolent and wanting us home, thought we were crazy for having left in the first place and wanted to close the road.

We were together. We slid in behind the snow plow (provided by the highway department) and its flashing light, and it led the way. All the way home.
Together.

What Jesus Wants for Us

That’s what Jesus wants for his people, you know. He wants us to be together, united in love and hope, in faith and purpose, in direction and spirit. And Spirit.
You and I were in his heart and on his mind when he spoke to the Father: “I pray . . . for those who will believe in me . . . that all of them may be one. . . . May they be brought to complete unity” (John 17:20-21, 23).

That’s what the Holy Spirit is still telling God’s people through the words of the great apostle. Paul is physically imprisoned (under house arrest), but his spirit is in no way eclipsed as he points to the wonder of what God has done for his people and to the calling that we have received.

To be gentle.

To be patient.

To be loving.

To celebrate the One who makes us one.

Eugene Peterson in The Message paraphrases Paul’s words in this way as the apostle urges us to “run on the road God has called us to travel”:

In light of all this, here’s what I want you to do. While I’m locked up here, a prisoner for the Master, I want you to get out there and walk—better yet, run!—on the road God called you to travel. I don’t want any of you sitting around on your hands. I don’t want anyone strolling off, down some path that goes nowhere. And mark that you do this with humility and discipline—not in fits and starts, but steadily, pouring yourselves out for each other in acts of love, alert at noticing differences and quick at mending fences.

You were all called to travel on the same road and in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly. You have one Master, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who rules over all, works through all, and is present in all. Everything you are and think and do is permeated with Oneness.

So, united as one because of the One who loved us, our task is to “run on the road God called us to travel.” God has called us. God has empowered us. God has given us the unity we need to have the strength for the task.

Unity is something God gives. It’s a gift. A priceless gift bought by nothing less than the blood of God’s Son and kept alive and vibrant by the power of his Spirit.
Paul’s plea is not that Christians somehow create unity. We might as well try to create a sunrise. What he wants us to do is to keep it, honor it, cherish it. He wants us to realize what a priceless gift we’ve been given. He wants us to recognize the unity that already exists through God’s Spirit.

That’s not always easy. Paul was well aware that folks, Christian or not, sometimes fuss.

I don’t have any idea what was causing friction, for example, between two Philippian gals named Euodia and Syntyche. I do know that the friction was real, and the resulting fire had created enough smoke that Paul recognized a real danger to the church. He singles those ladies out and entreats them to “make up your differences as Christians should” (Philippians 4:2, PHILLIPS).

Now, let’s be kind here. Let’s assume that both of these gals were fine Christian women who, on the whole, did much that was good for God’s people in Philippi. But they have gone down in history simply as two women who fussed loudly and longly enough that their quarrel threatened the health of the church they both undoubtedly professed to love.

They fussed.

But did their quarrel ever erase the fact that they were both sisters in the Lord? No! Paul doesn’t write, “Become sisters in Christ!” That would be nonsense; they already were, even when the fur was flying. He is saying, “Act like what you are—sisters in the Lord.”

I would be a fool if I thought I needed to somehow create brotherhood between my younger brother and myself. It’s already there, given to us by our parents through no effort of our own. He is my brother, and most of the time I’m proud to claim him. (Then there was the time he tried to blow the top off the neighbor’s fencepost . . .) But whether I claim him or not makes no difference at all as far as our physical brotherhood goes. We are brothers because we have the same parents. Jim and I cannot create brotherhood. What we can do is recognize and cherish it.

So, says Paul, can God’s kids. We can recognize our essential unity with all who are God’s children. We can cherish the unity Christ died to make a reality. We can celebrate the fact that we are members of one Body. If we want to be mature, and if we want to run well on the road God has called us to travel, we will.

God calls us to recognize and cherish unity and thus to grow in maturity. It seems a delightful paradox that with unity as one of the deepest and finest gifts made possible by Christ, the Giver absolutely delights in the variety and diversity of the other gifts he has given his people.

My wife and I just bought a limited edition print by the gifted artist, G. Harvey. I should mention that Juana and I are not in the habit of buying fine art on a regular basis. At this stage in our lives and in the life of our four-boys-with-one-in- college-and-three-with-car-insurance family, our annual art budget is pretty much dwarfed by such items as dental bills and tennis shoes.

We broke the budget to buy this print. If we can ever afford to frame it, it will hang in the heart of our home. Entitled, “The Blessing,” it will be a blessing to our family.

Depicted in the painting, in a turn of the century setting with city shops, a carriage, and gas streetlights as the background, two women have stopped to admire a new mother’s baby. The print is a beautiful thing, signed and numbered, splashed with color and rich with the warmth that is such a trademark of this fine artist. Warm yellows and crimsons and deep lavenders spread across the painting. The silver glow of the street lights suffuses the scene. The colors spread all across the canvas, different colors each with a role to play, and each beautiful but far more beautiful together, united, than they could ever be apart.

In painting the beautiful picture of his church, the Master Artist chose the rich, deep hue of unity to tie the whole painting together, but with that beautiful color deftly brushed behind it all, he began to skillfully splash the canvas with such a diversity of color and stroke and texture as to take our breath away with its beauty.

Paul tells us plainly, as Peterson paraphrases, “[Being one] doesn’t mean you should all look and speak and act the same. Out of the generosity of Christ, each of us is given his own gift.”3 So that the whole body is built up and blessed.

What an amazing body, the Body of Christ! To see part of its wonder, we need look no further than our own bodies. In their fine book, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Paul Brand and Philip Yancey quote from St. Augustine: “Men go abroad to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.”4

Brand and Yancey, though, focus our eyes inward as they discuss the wonders of DNA. In its DNA, they write, “every cell possesses a genetic code so complete that the entire body could be reassembled from the information in any one of the body’s cells.”

In fact, write the authors, our bodies are being reassembled every moment as old cells die and new ones are formed to replace them. As they point out, not one of us inhabits the same body he wore ten years ago. All of the cells except brain cells and nerve cells are entirely new. The human body, they write, “is more like a fountain than a sculpture: maintaining its shape, but constantly being renewed.” But because of the identical DNA locked within each cell, the body remains a unified whole.

According to Brand and Yancey, if the instructions imprinted on each DNA strand were written out, they would fill a thousand six-hundred page books!7
But they are not written in books; they are written inside each of the hundred trillion cells in our bodies binding each cell with every other cell to work for the good of the whole body.

So it is with the Body of Christ.

Just as the complete identity code of my body inheres in each individual cell, so also the reality of God permeates every cell in his Body, . . . I sense that bond when I meet strangers in India or Africa or California who share my loyalty to the Head; instantly we become brothers and sisters, fellow cells in Christ’s Body. I share the ecstasy of community in a universal Body that includes every man and woman in whom God resides.

What an amazing Body, given life itself and all good gifts from the Giver of all. One Lord, one God, one Father, but many, many gifts. And every one of them given so that we, and our brothers and sisters, God’s church, can run with joy on the “road God has called us to travel.”

As Paul pens Ephesians, he may be “imprisoned” under house arrest, but he sees far beyond the walls of his confinement. He sees what God has done for each of us, and he urges us to live our lives in light of God’s calling, to celebrate the unity of God’s Spirit, to accept and use for God’s glory the rich gifts our God has given, so that we can grow up and be “like Christ in everything.” The apostle wants us to be “fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ.”

Quite a few years ago now, my brothers and I began renovating my Grandmother and Grand-daddy Key’s old home down in Robert Lee, Texas. This old house in Coke County was much like the snows of my childhood in Amarillo: it seemed a lot bigger when I was smaller! But, for my siblings and myself, it was a very big part of our growing up years, though it’s really not a large house at all.

Grandmother and Granddaddy had been gone for a long time when we began working to restore the old place. It was sadly in need of paint, and we were trying to answer that need in the interior of the almost ancient house when we came to an old doorway.

It was just an old doorway. Between the kitchen and the living room. But I remembered it so well!

Every morning Granddaddy would sit in the kitchen, just inside that door, in front of a little brown homemade stand with a radio perched on top. He sat there astride an old kitchen chair listening to the morning news, and he always held a fly swatter. I figured he might occasionally swat flies with it, but I was quite sure that he swatted grandkids with it—playfully. Every time one of us ventured through the door.

I never round that corner without halfway expecting to see Granddaddy sitting there.

I never navigate through that doorway without expecting to feel a swat in the tail section.

In that old doorway so filled with memories, my brothers and I found a treasure—such a treasure that only a barbarian would dream of painting over it. A treasure that we removed with care and committed to the keeping of one of the older brothers. A treasure that was, to us if to no one else, almost a holy thing.
It was the 1 X 2-inch doorjamb that ran from the floor to the ceiling. On that thin and ancient piece of wood, up and down the middle portion of its length, were old pencil marks, lines, and by each mark, a name.

You know what it was, don’t you? You probably had one of these in your home or in your own grandparents’ house. It was the growth chart for the grandkids. It was where they backed you up, put a book on your head, and drew the line to chart your growth over the past year.

Did you know that God’s house has one of those, too? Yes, indeed, I’m certain it does because his is a house full of growing kids. Some of us are just little guys and gals. We back up to the doorjamb (this one is gold, you know), but before we turn around we see lots of marks. Way up on the jamb we see some names we recognize.

Like Paul.

And Peter.

And James.

And John.

But there’s one mark at the very top, the tallest of all. And by that mark is written the name of Jesus. He’s our elder Brother, you know. He’s the biggest, the tallest, the most mature of all. He’s the One who is the standard for growth in the whole house so that “in all things,” in unity and maturity, “we will grow up into him” (4:15).

Jesus is so tall. I don’t think our elder Brother would blame us if occasionally we’re almost tempted to loose hope when we see how very big he is and how very small we are. But Christ is the One cheering us on. He and the Father, the best Father of all, know we’ve got a long way to go, but love mingles with pride in their eyes, and we hear the Father’s voice, “My! Look how you’ve grown!”

Thank God for divine eyes which see, as Natalie Sleeth writes in her beautiful song, “Hymn of Promise,”

In the bulb there is a flower;
In the seed, an apple tree;
In cocoons, a hidden promise;
Butterflies will soon be free!

In the cold and snow of winter
There’s a spring that waits to be
Unrevealed until its season,
Something God alone can see.

God sees the growth. And he is the One who makes the growth possible because “his very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God, robust in love.”

We finally made it home that snowy night. It was a long way to travel in the snow and ice. It was cold and slick and the roads were treacherous. Sometimes we wondered if we’d ever see the lights of home.

But we were on the right road.

Moving in the right direction.

Traveling together.

And we made it home.