Coming Home (Part 3/3)

This post is part three of my story. Parts one and two can be found here and here, respectively.

There are roughly 684 miles between my spot in upper lot and my parking spot on the road alongside the house across the street from my home. It's a journey I've made at least a dozen times in the past few years; I thought that I knew every last stretch of road I would come across. But as it turned out, God had plans for using that very same road to stretch me.

This story is all true.

***

I sat down on my bed and I read the book. And I stopped for dinner out with friends, an unexpected second chance to actually say goodbye (which I had apparently neglected) and hang out one last time before the social winter of summer.

As vaguely as I can, I want to explain a perhaps peculiar belief of mine. Growing up, I never really understood why we pray over every meal. It was cultural in my family; that is, it was what we did. I couldn't imagine a meal without it anymore than a meal without plates. Each of us kids would take turns praying over the meal, an honor which had a lot to do with my salvation from a dead-end life of debauchery at the age of four.

I've always been a thinker, though, and this was one of the first beliefs passed down from my parents that I began to question and examine within any sort of what I would now call a theological construct. When I was in junior high, I linked this practice to the description in Daniel of Daniel's thrice daily prayer routine. "This has been misapplied," I thought, and felt smarter than everyone around me, peons still chained to this belief in prayer before meals.

As it turns out, that's actually in the Bible a little bit later as well. I think. I can't really find it right now. I did find that we should definitely pray over our meals if we suspect they may have been offered as pagan sacrifices. Anyway, with the biblical knowledge of the four of you who read my blog, I'm sure I'll soon find out where every proof-text for the necessity of praying over a burrito is in the Bible.

And it's a good thing, I guess. It fosters an attitude of thanksgiving and fellowship with God and all. And that's all really good. I don't know, it's just, it feels like posturing to me. And that's really difficult for me. I approach these things from the mentality that I would rather be known by people as the worst heathen and known by God than seen as a spiritual giant among men and yet not actually possess any sort of meaningful relationship with God.

This was supposed to be a short tangent. What I'm getting at, I guess, is that I'd rather show a waitress that such a thing as Love or Charity is with a great tip than be remembered as the guy who prayed ostentatiously over the meal and also made a huge deal out of being gratted--as if the server's decision. It's difficult for me to write about this without using terminology that is unnecessary--or at least improper for a future youth pastor--so I'll end by saying that God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of this crap. Everyone in food service knows that Christians are cheap and rude; could we possibly more reflect the antithesis of Christ, who gave his all in loving service for us?

But dinner was good.

I returned to my room and spent the rest of the night more or less alone, reading. I woke up the next morning, and read more. When I got the call that my car had been finished, I was honestly a little bit disappointed. During the quiet times of my ride over to the dealership, I tried to imagine a way to drive and read at the same time. I was that hooked on this book.

I started my drive and successfully navigated the craters sprinkled along the first twenty or so miles of 412. I stopped for lunch at about one o'clock; I bought a box of Ritz crackers and a liter of Mountain Dew from a Conoco that was built into a Subway that shared its space with an Indian casino. It was one of the more disjunctive experiences of my life, and disjunction is my chief delight, so that's really saying something. A woman won $72 from a nickel slot machine while I was waiting in line. Actually, I was just standing behind someone who was standing at the register, talking to the clerk. Which, while it sounds like standing in line, was actually just wasting time, since the old man I was standing behind was the casino/restaurant/gas station's security guard.

And Kansas was.

I'm very proud of that last paragraph. It almost substitutes for those five or so hours of driving in a remarkably straight line through Kansas without actually missing anything of my experience. Amazing.

One of the real highlights of my drive westward comes when I hit the town of Genoa, Colorado. According to wikipedia, my source for basically everything, a little less than 200 people live in Genoa. Holding my I-70 in Colorado speed of 80mph, it takes me less than half a minute to enter and exit the town. Main Street is only three-tenths of a mile long.

But the town is 5500 feet above sea-level and most everything between it and the Rockies is lower than that, so on a clear day you can actually see the Front Range from Cheyenne Mountain to Pikes Peak, even though you're still about 100 miles out. It's pretty exciting and a good way to get me excited about the drive about 8.5 hours in. I looked for a picture, but I couldn't find one. So you'll just have to take my word for it.

Anyway, that's what happens on a clear day. On this day, though, storm clouds billowed over Limon (a major junction town in the plains of eastern Colorado) and so, instead of mountains, I could only see a thick sheet of rain between myself and my home. But what's a little water, right?

Wrong. As it turns out, by the time I hit Limon right around dusk, a tornado warning had been issued and marble sized hail was pelting my car. I couldn't really see anything so I pulled off I-70 and hung out under an overpass for a while. I listened to the seventh and eighth innings of the Rockies-Reds game texting my family to try to find out what the forecast was for where I was. The conversation went something like this:

Me: weather limon?
Them: oh well it looks pretty dark out there. might rain.
Me: def raining and hail. any forecast?
Them: im at mall

At this point I broke off communications and waited for the storm to let up, which it did shortly thereafter. I started down the home stretch of my long journey, a two-lane highway numbered 24. About a mile into the road, I received two text messages from my mom and a call from my dad, all telling me to wait in Limon. Apparently, the storm I had just been in was only the first round in a powerful two-punch combo, the second of which was already raising all sorts of hell south west of me, traveling toward me up the highway I needed to use to get home. So I went into my second Subway/gas station of the day, reclined in a booth facing the window, and read some more of my new book.

The hail started small, but it was golf-ball sized within a dozen seconds or so. An old deaf man came up to me and we had a whole conversation about the hail and driving in it and tornadoes. I only kinda know what we said. I think he probably felt the same way. All those years of charades-esque theatre exercises really come in handy every now and then. My phone rang--or buzzed, since my phone is almost never audibly on--and I tried to excuse myself from the company of my new friend in a way that wouldn't seem rude. He quickly understood and wandered off to discuss the weather with someone else. I kinda felt like I was showing off, holding my phone up to my ear and gloating before a deaf man "Look what I can do!" But I wasn't and I don't think he felt that way. I just worry, I guess.

My dad was on the other end of the line. They had transformed my house into a veritable storm tracking bunker, and he instructed me to start my drive home right then. The first storm had left Limon, the second storm would be north of 24 by the time I intercepted it, and a third storm (which had just recently appeared) would remain south of 24 until I made it to the Springs. With all the excitement I could hear in his voice, I felt bad telling him that the wrath of God was still being poured out on Limon outside. But I did promise him that I would leave as soon as it let up, and I reminded him that I don't get cell phone service between Limon and the Springs, so if anything changed he would need to let me know right away.

Within a minute or two, the hail moved out. The tornado warning was still active, so nobody else left the truck stop with me when I dashed out to my car and sped out onto 24. In fact, as I got going on the highway, it became clear that I was the only one trying the run right then. As Limon faded in my rear view mirror, I began to feel alone and afraid. I cataloged the towns I would pass through to get to the Springs, trying to engage my mind on something other than the storm. Matheson, Peyton, Calhan, Falcon, Simla. I couldn't shake from my head the fact that, prior to all my trips to and from Tulsa, the only times I ever heard of these towns were when the meteorologist on TV would be frantically pleading for the people of these towns to seek shelter from tornadoes.

Because of the way that the storms were configured that night, there was constant lightning all around me. I should have mentioned this in the prologue in part 1 of this saga, but I'm also kinda afraid of lightning. I know, I know...not really a grown up fear. And I know that many of you see the wonder and power of God in it, and blah blah blah; but, for me, any time something is both wildly unpredictable and nearly certainly fatal, I get a little wobbly-kneed. Oh, and thunder's loud and loud noises scare me too.

I've never felt so completely alone as I did that night. Probably. I mean, I've never felt so actually alone as I did that night; the plains were pitch-black, no one else was in sight, and my cell-phone couldn't even provide me with the potential of human contact. But I've felt more lonely, I guess--hopefully that's a distinction that makes sense outside of my head. Either way I couldn't help but think of the stories where the disciples are out on the boat in the storm and then Jesus shows up in some way and calms everything down.

And we're so hard on the disciples. "What an idiot! Peter steps out on the water and then gets scared...I mean, Jesus is right there!" "They hang out with him all this time and they still don't realize what kind of power he had..." But you know what...forget that. It's scary being out there in a storm, all alone and dark and exposed. And they were way more exposed than I was.

It was intense, and there were portions where I was driving through two and three inches of hailstones lying on the road, pooling the water into the two narrow channels which the tires of the few intrepid somewhere before me had cut through the ice. I stayed hunched over my wheel until--a few miles before Falcon, I guess--I noticed that the lightning in front of me had kinda subsided. I started to examine the sky to check my assumption. And then I saw it.

That star was probably the most beautiful I've ever seen. It meant the sky ahead was clear. It meant that the rain and the hail was over. It meant that I was actually going to finally get home.

That star is a lot of things.

I was home with my family within twenty minutes. And I was happy and at home again.

After everybody else went to bed, I sat alone on the couch in my parents' living room and I finished the book.

***

Peace, love, and joy to you all.

An epilogue? Hasn't this been long enough already?


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