I’m a planner. On the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
scale, I’m a strong INTJ, that J meaning that I tend to approach life in a
structured way, planning, organizing, fixing things to achieve my goals.
This past week, my goal was to get home to New
Jersey and get started on a much anticipated and necessary three month break from my pastoral routine. And as a corollary, to not exhaust Jim and me in the process. Given
the fact that I, what with preparing for my three months away as I would for my
own death and all, was already pretty exhausted by the time we pulled out of
Sioux City and headed the Winnebago down I-29 toward Omaha on the first leg of
our journey home, I had planned carefully to make sure that Monday’s drive was an easy
one, no more than 5 hours max from Jim’s sister’s driveway to campsite
#4 at Honeycreek State Park. I’m a planner, a good one,
and my plan was coming together nicely.
Until Mile Marker 105. Where the forward progress
of our journey home came to a screeching halt.
Three hours later, the driver of
the biggest, heaviest, most impressively shiny tow truck I’ve ever seen hauled
us into a farmyard carved out of miles and miles of soybean fields, announced
that, chickens, pigs, and sleeping dog notwithstanding, this WAS indeed the
right address and thus the auto repair shop we were looking for. He unhooked the RV,
shook our hands, wished us good luck, and drove off in a cloud of dust.
It was now 2pm on Monday afternoon. We should have been sitting by the
fire in campsite #4. Instead, we were in a farmyard, several miles outside of Onawa, Iowa,
at the mercy of complete strangers. And there was absolutely not one thing that
I could do to make it different, or better, or different, at the very least. We
had promised to be home by Friday. People were depending on us. All our
reservations were made, and my carefully plan depended on us arriving at campsite #4
sometime on Monday.
What if the farmer/mechanic can't fix the bus, get the
parts, find the time? What if it takes a couple of days, a week, a month? What
if, what if, what if…
Meanwhile, it is a stunningly beautiful day,
Iowa-at-the-beginning-of-September gorgeous. The farmer’s garden is lush with
apples and tomatoes and giant zinnias of every color. There are chickens all
over the place. I love chickens. If it weren’t for the 35-foot Winnebago up on
the lift with its guts hanging out, life would be unbelievably good.
But there’s always a 35-foot Winnebago up on a
lift, isn’t there? There’s always something, something to wind us up, to kick our
anxiety into high gear, to pull our minds and hearts out of whatever small
goodness there might be in the place where we are and into the chaos of what
might have been and what might be coming next. And if our own personal 35-foot
Winnebagos don’t do it, the siren song of unlimited 24-7 access to the agony of
the world in the palm of our hands, and the concomitant powerlessness of the
individual to affect or remedy any of that agony in the moment, is just waiting
to suck us in.
There’s an ancient Celtic prayer that begins with
the words: Lord, enable me to place my trust in you, and so live in the present
moment. Lead me to accept the now. Guard my heart from stress over what has gone wrong before and what will
without a doubt go wrong ten minutes from now. Enable me to trust Jesus enough to
embrace what is, to find God in the place where I am.
It was nearly midnight before we got to campsite
#4 at Honeycreek State Park, just this side of Tuesday morning. The night was beautifully still and the glory of God burst from the heavens. Lord, enable me to place my trust in you, and so live in the present
moment. Not exactly what I had planned, but I’m pretty sure that’s the moment my sabbatical began.
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