Man With A Knive: A Non-Event

Once, when asked where he’d been, a famous Bible perdonality replied that he’d been roaming to and fro over the surface of the earth, from going up and down therein.

Friday, that could have been my answer to the same question.

With Ginny down sick with her vicious cold, I ran several errands she normal takes care of; that meant I got to drive her new car for the fifth or sixth time since we bought it back in August.

Whee!

I got to drive her new car!

I drove to the bank, the gas station, the hardware store, the post office, the credit union, the grocery store — and to WalMart.

In WalMart I bought wooden matches for my pipe, swimming pool chemicals, odds and ends, and flowers to take home to Ginny to lighten her suffering with that cold. I would have bought a loaf of bread too, but after walking three blocks in that monstrous huge store without being able to find bread, I gave up.

When I went out into the parking lot to put things in the car and move on to my next stop, a man with a knife in his hand came up to me.

About a four inch blade.

Although cars filled the lot, no people were within a hundred yards of us when he came out from behind a car parked about three spaces away.

He carried the knife in his right hand and some small something in his left. And he was talking with animation, gesturing and babbling some patter.

Alarmed the moment I saw his knife, I determined in my heart to kill him if he made the slightest aggressive move. I focused on his shoulders as he talked and gestured to me; an opponent may fool you with his eyes, but no one can move hands or feet without his shoulders broadcasting that move first.

It’s been years since I studied aikido, but when that guy approached me, I immediately assessed his posture and dropped back into a stance which appears relaxed but is a strong position for launching killing blows.

I am not a violent man but I made up my mind that if this man needed killing, I’d do it….Probably I overestimated my ability; the last time anyone attacked me, he knocked me down from behind, stole my wallet and ran away all in one fluid motion.

Hurt my pride more than anything else.

But this time, I’d got my tail feathers all atwitter over a non-event (as usual). The guy in the WalMart parking lot was just a gregarious good ‘ol boy who was driving his wife’s car when a tail light went out and he’d stopped in WalMart to buy a replacement bulb but when he went to put it in the socket broke and he was using his knife to pry tiny pieces apart to fix it. And he wanted to explain his frustrations to somebody.

And I happened to be there.

It never occurred to him that approaching a stranger in a parking lot with an open knife in hand might not be a smart move on his part.

I’m glad I’m the person he approached or he might have ended up in real trouble.

I sympathized with his frustration over his broken taillight. Then I drove on to my own next errand stop at the Post Office.

Now, in all my driving around, I had not consciously given God a thought… but as I pulled out of the Post Office parking lot, I realized with surprise that all the time I’ve been driving here and there, I’d also been praying about this and that, for one person or another.

It’s been so long since I’ve driven anywhere, I’d forgotten that I do that — pray while doing mindless, repetitious tasks. Such are my most precious prayer times.

And I had forgotten that.

While doing ordinary chores, while going about daily duties, these are the best times to meet and love the Lord Jesus.

I fear that Hollywood movies have conditioned us to expect spectacular showmanship from God.

Yes, parting the Red Sea was spectacular, but He only did that once. Throughout the Bible He met people who were fishing, working in an office, plowing a field, driving their wife’s new car, or whatever.

God does not do PRODUCTION NUMBERS — or at least not very often.

He was not in the whirlwind nor in the earthquake, but in the still small voice.

When Moses pronounced the first and great commandment, He said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might”.

He then tells us the times to think of Him:

“When thou sitteth in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou riseth up.”

This thrills me!

I think it is great that God meets us in the ordinary, even when we drive on the highway… But today, I’m going to have to get used to that “when thou liest down” part of the commandment.

Ginny’s cold is better (I think it was the flowers that brought her out of it).

But that contagious woman I’m married to has infected me.

Today I hack and cough and drip and sniffle.

It’s my turn to lie in bed and be pampered.