His Eye Is On My Sparrows

One’s personal troubles and concerns pale in comparison to suffering and anguish of others, don’t they? I have a friend dying of cancer. There are more than 100,000 people suffering in Myanmar because of the recent cyclone, and tens of thousands in western China are missing loved ones buried beneath the rubble in the aftermath of a 7.8 earthquake. Many hundreds of the dead are schoolchildren, and in the China of a One Child Policy, these are only children. The grief must be awful.

Good people all around the globe are stepping up, as they always do, when there are catastrophes of this magnitude.

Still, when you face your own struggles, while they might be miniscule compared to what others are going through, they are yours. They’re personal. You have to deal with them. It doesn’t matter how they rank on some disaster meter. The story I am going to tell you, isn’t a 7.8 story, but even at .05 it was important to me.

My girls, who lived in different parts of the country, hook up last week in Boston. Their plan is to drive from Boston to St. Louis—no need to go into details of why and wherefore. They meet with friends in Boston, and don’t leave until late afternoon.

They drop down into Connecticut, and then, the sisterhood of the traveling pants begins an adventure. They miss a turn here, and a freeway there, and get sucked down into the New York City area, have trouble getting across the George Washington bridge, but finally hit I-80 and begin to cruise across Pennsylvania. They’ve just become the sisterhood of the unraveling pants.

It’s 3 a.m. and they’re still driving on I-80 when suddenly the car loses all power. It’s a little foreign job, and all they can do is coast to the shoulder of the road and pull over. As far as they know, they’re miles from nowhere, and my girls have about as much directional sense as a rat in a maze—all due respect to the rat.

The oldest gets out of the car and steps on to the freeway in her flip-flops to flag down the next vehicle coming over the hill. It’s an 18-wheeler and he gears down from 75 m.p.h. to a dead stop in like no time.

At this point she calls me. “Dad, we’re out here in the middle of Pennsylfreakinvania, don’t know where we are, and the car broke down, and this trucker’s stopped to help us.” Dad is thousands of miles away. I’m glad she called, because before her call I had absolutely nothing to worry about what with the girls simply on a road trip across the country and all. No worries. Not with these two.

Long story short: the trucker was most helpful. He and his wife had quit their jobs and had long hauls from New York to Los Angeles, and his wife was asleep in the cab right then. He gave the girls a lift to the nearest town. It was Saturday night. The next day is Mother’s Day and Pentecost.

The living Christ shows up on the road at 3 a.m.

And there’s more. A good friend makes calls. A church is contacted. The pastor picks up the girls and brings them to church in the morning. There’s a mechanic in the church who can fix the car. The oldest told me that these people stepped up way beyond the call of duty; they clearly were stepping up to some higher call.

The living Christ in the pastor. The living Christ in the people. The living Christ in the mechanic.

I’ve e-mailed the pastor but still don’t know the name of the mechanic.

The girls are home now. The car is still in a Pennsylvania hospital, on life support for all I know.

What I do know is I am grateful to people I don’t even know.

The great Ethel Waters used to sing, “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.”

I give thanks that His eyes were on my two little chirping sparrows that dark night in Pennsylvania.

In a couple of days, I’m going to share the story of the “Roundabout Judge.” And after that the story of a cross that's causing huge problems. Of course, a cross often does.

Check back.