Chapter XII
The Omniscience God of the Road
I admit it I was
asleep! I had dozed but for how
long, I did not know. I could
have stayed asleep had I not been awaken. I did not know how long I had been
asleep.
When you go to sleep
behind the wheel, should you awake, you do not know how long you have
been asleep or what has happened during the time you were
asleep. It is a very scary
moment.
In the ministry God
called me to work with drivers; I have had the occasion to hear scary
stories of drivers actually traveling for miles without a single memory
of what just happened. Were they
asleep they might as well have been for all they knew about what
transpired?
I am not happy about
having to admit that I had fallen asleep. It is the cardinal sin in
driving. As a professional
driver this is one thing you cannot ever let happen.
You can make wrong
lane changes or stop too quickly for your load. The end results of these issues do
not always end in death, but they can certainly be the start of a
disastrous circumstance. It can
be tragic not only for the driver but for the general public as well.
Going to sleep is going to be catastrophic for
someone for sure. Add the fact
that you have 46 live bodies behind you who are depending on your
professionalism to get them to where they are going you have a catastrophe
looking for an accident.
It magnifies the
liability of going to sleep while driving. Their being asleep adds to the
tremendous professional trust they put in you as a driver. The more tired you become, the more
trust they place in you as a driver.
As a young driver
learning how to drive, the one evaluation as a driver is that you had
to reach the point your co-driver feels confident going to sleep behind
you as you drive. He has to feel
confident that you could handle the unit.
WOW
slowly, it
started becoming surreal to me.
Could I have just had an encounter with an Angel? I questioned in my mind if God does
these things in the aftermath of the New Testament.
The process of
elimination led me to believe that no human hand touched me to awaken
me. There could be only one
explanation for what happened. I
now had an actual experience that I was certain was not man-oriented.
The other end result
would have been the coach laying on its side
on the shoulder or median.
Hopefully in the process, the coach would not have encountered
another vehicle. But since the
coach would have been under its own control, that could have happened
as well.
Bodies, luggage, and
kids struggling to understand what happened would be the order of the
moment. Death, tears, fears, and
loss of trying to get a handle on what happened would be the
consequence of my actions for having gone to sleep at the wheel.
But this was not the outcome! Instead, I had an encounter with an
Angel in the very presence of God Himself. God had dispatched an Angel for the
sole purpose of waking me up so that all these kids and everyone else
would not face horrendous circumstances.
God, the all
knowing, omnipotent, and omnipresent Being was watching over me; knew the
predicament; and set in motion a solution to keep it from
happening. Did I have the right
to ask for this provision?
NO! But in His infinite
knowledge of yesterday, today, and tomorrow He gave it. Thank God He did.
Can you imagine
after careful examination God had sent an Angel to awaken me?
I was so enamored
with the action that I was still unsure how physically it could have
been. My mind could not
comprehend what obviously had just happened.
Let me tell you
something. When you come to the
realization you have just been in the presence of a Holy God, and you
have been touched you are awake!
God sent an Angel to
physically wake me in a way that only a human can understand with a
touch. Your senses are soaring;
your intellect is working; and fatigue has become a thing of the past.
I was alert; I
acknowledged my responsibility as a driver; I acknowledged I was
entrusted with the lives of those on the coach; and most of all I saw
myself as God saw me a person in need. He met that need.
All those mistakes
of not reporting the truth of what was happening to the office; not
getting another driver to take over; my personal expenses; and my
fatigue were removed from my mind.
I was concentrating on the here and now and keeping that coach
safe.
Does that make what
I did right in the sight of God?
NO! Did I do wrong? YES!
God forbid but in reality that is exactly what I did! Should I ever place God in a box and
in essence force Him to respond to me or others again? NO!
What it did do was,
first, plant a mile marker in my mind that God is faithful and will
protect His children in accordance with His will.
Ps
91:9-12, 9 If
you say, The Lord
is my refuge, and you make the Most High your dwelling, 10 no
harm will overtake you, no disaster will come near your tent. 11 For he will
command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways
NIV
Second, He expects
us to follow Him in accordance with His Word. We are not to tempt Him directly or
indirectly.
In Matthew 4, when
Jesus went through the temptation experience with satan. One of the temptations was to mock
Jesus by saying, If you are the Son of God throw yourself down. Your Father will send 10,000 angels
to rescue you. Jesus answered him, It is also written: Do not put
the Lord your God to the test.
By my actions, I was
testing God indirectly through the lives of everyone on the coach. My going to sleep could have thrown
them down the side of a mountain to test God. They did not put God to the
test. I did! I tempted God with their lives! Would He rescue them?
It was bad enough
that I was testing God myself, but I was placing these kids and
chaperons at risk as well. They
were asleep and not even aware that I was indirectly testing God
through my misguided judgment.
God is faithful and
deserving of our trust! He
proves it every day in every way and why I continue to question Him, I
cannot answer. If ever I get a
prayer right it would be, Lord make me more deserving of your
omniscience!
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