Luke 1:46-56: Friendly Fire

A friend of mine, Wayne, used to work for the government. Years ago he found himself driving around one of the cabinet ministers and his assistant was sitting in the back with his tape recorder taping everything the minister said as per protocol at that time in that situation. They were driving around sizing up the damage from all of the forest fires in the north when all of a sudden their vision became impaired. It became more and more impaired. Wayne was chauffeur and he could barely see anything in front of him and it wasn’t winter so it wasn’t snow – it was smoke from the fire. The fire was so close you could almost feel it. The politician asked Wayne, ‘what do we do now’?

Wayne said, ‘Pray’. Wayne is a solid Christian and he has been for a quite a long time. ‘Pray’, he says, ‘we can’t see anything but we can’t stop driving or its game over; we can’t do anything else but drive and pray - so pray!’

The assistant with the tape recorder in the back begins to pray quite a bit when Wayne hears the cabinet minister, the politician, start to pray. He prays, ‘God if you save us, I will go to church on Sunday.’ They wait patiently as Wayne drives slowly through the fire. They wait and they pray as they await their salvation from the fire.

When they get out of the fire and they start to relax a bit and get ready for their next tour, Wayne approaches the politician, the cabinet minister, and he asks him, ‘So you’re going to church on Sunday?”

“Oh, you heard that, did you?”

“Yes, and so will everyone; your assistant has it on tape”

“Oh, well maybe I should go to church then…”

Now Wayne doesn’t know whether or not the politician was true to his word. He doesn’t know whether he did go to church or not but while he was waiting for his salvation, in that moment he approached God, he encountered God and we can only hope that once that waiting was over he continued with God.

In everything in our lives, God is with us. He is with us in the easy times. He is with us in the difficult times but it seems often that it is only in the midst of the difficult times, that we call on God. A real friend is with you in the good times too; they don’t just come around when they are in a jam or when they need something from us. Question for us today: are we a friend of God?

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