Coffee On Top of the Car

I Like my Coffee Like I Like my Men

Sliding off the Roof of my Car as I Drive Away 

November 19, 2020

I will leave it to my Dear Reader to decide whether and to what degree to determine if and when such an allusion to men sliding off cars entails any socially undesirable suggestions.

But what I can say from my studies "in proper theology and geometry" is that Man is created in God's image. This means he enjoys in some small measure the autonomy of God. We feel funny (and maybe even do not sleep as well, in the vain attempt to transform ourselves into a consciously cauterized, abominably amputated diminution of what He intended us to be and become in our fleeting, wilting grass-flowers semblance of time on this here lovely earth.

Inasmuch, however, as our spirits may quicken to life, however fleeting, we are ennobled. We rise up from the tepid, quotidian level of banal existence, and we stand up boldly, in a renewed awareness of our stature in Christ. It is then that we take on His Mission, in ripe evangelistic fervor, running into the fields for the harvest, which is all around us, bursting into fruit.

There, we cannot but behave as the Father in the lovely story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15 or thereabouts). Compelled by his sacrificial love, long-suffering patience, compassion, and unending grace, He casts aside all decorum of the role of a dignified father in the Ancient Near East (where elderly men always walked, never ran, and all younger people had to do all the work of coming all the way up to them); this Father shocks everyone around him, not least of all the son returning from his nefarious, ne're-do-well, scalawagging, wanton ways of filth unbecoming of even a man.

That father runs to his boy, seeing him coming from afar (meaning he had been sitting on his porch watching all this time, hoping and praying for his return). He runs to the boy, falls on his neck and kisses his boy. What a welcome! What implicit forgiveness. What Love!

Translate this to a modern times, when you have cars. I can see a father possessed of such unearthly love, dashing to the car if he sees his daughter leave in a huff, out of weakness and the confusion of a state of sin, headed to a party where he knows she will almost surely return to a sordid lifestyle of addictive drug consumption (against her better will), leaping atop the car and clinging with all his might to grab her and pull her out of the fire (not unlike the image we get from the Book of Jude, snatching one dabbling in sin straight out of the fire -- I forget what chapter...).

Maybe I will get a chance to do something like this for one of my wee ones. Just give'em time to grow up in a wicked, fallen world, and anything can happen. The only question is: Will I have the discernment to recognize at a glance what is going on, and the God-given courage to act in accordance with His will. 

That comes not from my own personal planning, but from my daily submission to Jesus, which is ever so compromised and short-circuited when we abstain from directly reading the text, colossal whole chunks, whole books in one sitting, the way the Early Christians conceived it to be. 

Well, they lacked the modern conveniences of TV to help them reduce their attention spans to a manageable dimension, something you can fold up and slip into the nice, crisp breast pocket of your White Sunday Shirt. My, doesn't that tract look nice! Have a good day in Christ, my Friend!