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Momentum

Good morning church family,

“Don’t be reckless,” I remember my dad telling me. “But remember – momentum is everything.”

This sage advice was given to me back when I only had a learners permit in my pocket and was about to try and get the family’s 12-passenger van from the campus of Vermont’s Castleton State College, where I had a job working in the cafeteria, to our home which sat high on a hill several miles away. It had been snowing throughout my dinner shift and by the time I was ready to punch out and head for home, most of the roadways had a couple of inches of greasy, slushy snow on them. As I walked out of work, I spied our big, blue van parked across the way. Approaching the van, I noticed that my dad, who had come to pick me up, was sitting in the passenger seat. “Oh no,” I thought to myself. “He’s going to have me drive.”

Unlike most teenage boys, I was not particularly motivated to do what was necessary to get my license and be let loose on the open road. I’m not entirely sure why that was, but I imagine it was a combination of the general malaise I was experiencing following a severe bout with depression and an inborn inclination to stay away from the edge of the nest. Whatever the case, I may be the only Vermonter in history to walk into the DMV and ask to have his 3-year learner’s permit renewed.

That Chevrolet Beauville van was a lot of car for a kid like me to try and handle. You’d turn the key in the ignition and the engine would roar to life; the van gently rocking in rhythm with the revving engine. It was as though the van was a strung-up bull stamping its hoof on the arena dirt; eyes red with rage and ready to be unleashed on the enemy hills and roadways ahead. I’d done okay riding that bull, but I had often witnessed my mom and dad struggle to keep it between the ditches when snow was piling up on the roads. The prospect of going tobogganing in the Chevy was a frightful thing to me. Without a lot of weight in the back and the Tate family economy unable to afford proper tires for the winter track, the van had a tendency to skid about and lose the lane. The worst of it was that our house was down a road that followed a river; wending and bending through the hollows of dense Green Mountain woods. The little country road was without a shoulder and thus without much room for error. If all that wasn’t enough, the driveway going up to our house was a couple hundred yards of steep incline with two hairpin turns switching back across field and meadow. Many times our van was left abandoned somewhere below while the family trudged up the hill with the groceries and everything else in tow.

“Hey Dad,” I said as my father emerged from the van with a car brush in his hand.

“Good evening son,” he replied; going right to work in clearing the snow from off of the windshield and over the door frames and side mirror. “Why don’t you hop in and drive, okay?”

I stood there in the dark wearing my uniform, black sneakers, and light coat; looking up at the parking lot light which showed a heavy snow falling down out of the sky. I was encouraged by the confidence my dad showed in me in that moment and the nonchalant manner in which he asked made me feel like more of a man than I was.

“Alright,” I said; walking over and brushing off the driver’s side mirror with the sleeve of my coat, “if you think so.”

With both of us in the car, my dad handed me the keys and I brought the big van to life. Settling in behind the wheel; I adjusted the seat and mirrors and turned on the wipers and headlights. Before putting the engine in gear, my dad went over the keys to winter driving. I listened the best I could but my heart was revving now in rhythm to the engine.

“Don’t be reckless,” he concluded soberly. “But remember – momentum is everything.”

On that drive and many more like it since, I’ve come to recognize the wisdom of my father’s words. Drive too fast and you can easily lose control. Drive too slowly and you can easily get stuck. The key is keeping a pace that has you scaling the treacherous steeps without skidding over the cliffs.

This advice has also served me well in my walk with the Lord. As it was with Abraham leaving Ur without an itinerary, the disciples leaving the Mount of Olives without a program, or Peter leaving the boat without a life preserver; God often calls us to take leaps of faith in our life. We’re given mountains to climb, rivers to cross, and valleys to navigate. And because these all exist within the environment of a desperate and fallen world – the way is often perilous and treacherous. To be prideful and reckless is to welcome disaster. But to be paralyzed with timidity is to be stuck on the wrong side of opportunity. What we need as believers is momentum. We must, with confidence, accept the keys from our Father, start the engine, put it in gear, and let our foot off the brake. We must give our faith some gas; careful to never get too far in front or too far behind the Lord. We must strive. We must struggle. We must endeavor. We must step out. In short – we must be leaping.

And when we do – fear not. God will see us home safe and sound.

We’re looking forward to gathering again in God’s house and having our hearts swell with gratitude for the hope we have in Jesus and with rejoicing for the fellowship we enjoy with both God and one another. It will be good to take a holiday from sin and its sad effects and enter into a Sabbath rest for our souls. Hallelujah! May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

  • Pastor Tate
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Unto Me

Good morning church family,

Having shaved and showered for the day, Danny quietly turned off the light before opening the bathroom door; being careful not to wake his wife who was sleeping peacefully in the bedroom beyond. Stepping back into the dark room, the blue glow coming from the digital clock on the dresser was the room’s only light. “4:48,” read the clockface. His eyes working hard to adjust to the darkness, Danny felt for the knobs of the dresser drawers and slid them open; pulling out a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and socks. With the skilled quiet of a cat burglar, he got dressed. The brief clattering of his swinging belt buckle was the only sound he made. Danny paused for a moment and looked at the outline of his wife’s body as she lay under the covers in their queen-sized bed. He sighed as he spied the hollow place in the sheets beside her. The tired husband felt atop the comforter for the curve of his wife’s hip; gently waking her as he kissed her on the cheek. “Goodbye sweetheart,” he whispered lovingly, “see you tonight.”

Padding down the stairs in his stocking feet, Danny walked through the living room, turning on the lights in the kitchen and starting the coffee maker. The sudden flood of light energized him as he fished things from the refrigerator and pantry for his lunch. He quickly packed his little Coleman cooler and sat down at the island. Danny couldn’t remember how it had started, but for years now he had always packed the dessert into his kids’ lunches. He bought little bakery boxes with flip-top lids and every morning he would put a cookie, candy bar, or some special confection in the box and write a note and draw a picture on the underside of the lid. Even though Avery was seventeen, Stephen fourteen, and Kirsten eleven, they still loved it just as much as when they were big enough to bounce on his knee.

The last of the dessert boxes stuffed in the kids’ lunch bags, Danny grabbed his keys to start his truck. He listened as the V8 engine rattled to life in the driveway just outside the kitchen door. The glasses in the cupboard chattered just a bit and the handle of the refrigerator vibrated as the engine worked to get in rhythm. Danny grabbed the breakfast sandwich he’d made the night before and put it in the microwave. He poured the coffee out into his thermos and turned off the pot. Taking his coat off the peg on the inside of the pantry door, Danny put his Coleman under his arm, his sandwich in his mouth, and with coffee in one hand, he opened and closed the door with the other.

It was a clear and cold autumn morning. Hopping in his truck, the temperature on the dash read 36° and the time read 5:21. It was election day in Michigan and all across America. Danny wished the polls were already open so he could shoot over to the Knights of Columbus and vote, but the doors wouldn’t be open for another hour-and-a-half. He put the half-ton Ford in gear and let the revving engine roll him out onto the street. He needed to be at the town sheds in Saginaw before 6am where he’d meet with the crew and start his day. “If I hustle with that grading job, I should be done mid-morning,” Danny said to himself as he reached to turn on the radio. “I bet I can buy a little time and swing back over to vote before lunch.”

Danny had worked for the Saginaw County Road Commission for over twenty years and had a good crew of guys working for him as he worked to keep the local roads and roadways safe and up to snuff. As part of that work, a couple-hundred miles of dirt road throughout the county needed grading once in the spring and once again in the fall. Danny hoped to tackle a rough patch of road in Chesaning on this particular morning and maybe do some repair to some portions of the shoulder that had washed out over the summer. The office had gotten a number of complaints from homeowners and motorists who said the washboards on the road were something awful. “It’s like driving over a hundred speed bumps!” was one of the screeds left on the office voicemail.

After setting up his crew for the day’s work, Danny drove out to where he’d left the grader on the side of the road the night before. It was a beautiful autumn day and the early sun promised to warm things up quickly. Danny climbed up into the grader and quickly got to work. He’d graded, sanded, plowed, brushcut, and repaired this stretch of road hundreds of times over the years. He’d scooped up a good amount of road kill off of it too. With an able confidence, he got right to work.

Danny wasn’t twenty minutes into the effort when, up on a nearby hillside, he noticed an old man struggling with a wheelbarrow as he walked toward a little house on the ridge. Danny kept one eye on his work and the other on the man. He didn’t like what he was seeing. The man appeared unsteady on his feet and looked to Danny to be laboring. Danny struggled with whether or not to make it his business to walk up and check on him. He needed to get this stretch of road finished before getting on to the next thing and, of course, he was hoping to shoot back home and vote.

But Danny pulled the grader over just shy of the old man’s driveway and turned off the motor. He scrambled down out of the rig and began walking briskly up the gravel drive. Walking along, he spied four or five cords of split firewood sitting in a pile not far from the house. Getting nearer the single-story ranch, Danny saw the man feebly attempting to stack wood out of the wheelbarrow and into a lean-to that sat beside the house.

“Morning,” Danny said, startling the old man a bit. “I was just down there grading the road and I saw you up here working. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t need anything.”

“Oh, thank you,” the old man said, turning to face Danny but unable to straighten up. Danny thought he must be nearing ninety. “I think I’m alright. Just picking away at that pile over there.” The old man put his hands on his hips and tried to smile. “I’ll get it all in before snow flies, I reckon.”

“That’s a lot of wood,” Danny said, returning the smile. “You don’t have anyone to help you?”

“Naw,” the man said while staring blankly at the pile; a hoarse rasp in his voice. “I manage alright.”

“I’m sure you do,” Danny said, joining the old man in looking over at the tall pile. “You living alone here?”

“No; my wife’s in there,” the old man said; swatting his hand back toward the house.

Danny looked at the desperate state of things around the house and at the proud old man dressed for work he really could no longer do. He looked up at the smoke curling out of the chimney stack and felt the conviction of the Lord. He knew He needed to offer some help.

“What do you say you let me and my son come over this Saturday and stack all this wood for you?” Danny asked humbly.

The man hesitated and looked Danny square in the eye; trying to measure him.

“We’ll let you direct us – we’ll stack it any which way you like.”

“Well,” the old man replied; cocking his head ever so slightly, “I suppose I might let you do that.”

“Wonderful!” Danny said with a big, honest smile. “We’ll be here right around 9am. Is that alright?”

“Sure enough,” came the humble reply. “You can come whenever you like. I’ll be here. I really do thank you, sir.”

“It looks like you’ve got more than enough wood there for this week,” Danny said with another smile, “and there’s no snow in the forecast, thankfully. I’d be pleased if you put that wheelbarrow away and leave the rest of the fun for me and my boy.”

“Alright,” the old man replied, “I won’t argue with you.” The two men shared a laugh and shook hands before Danny went back down the driveway to finish grading the road.

The work went quickly and Danny was back in his pickup truck before eleven. He didn’t need to be at his next job until one in the afternoon. He decided to hightail it back home to Saginaw and see about voting.

On the radio, the hosts were talking poll numbers, electoral college maps, and demographics. Danny opened his cooler and began fishing out items for his lunch. He listened to the chatter and looked out at all the signs, banners, flags, and billboards barking out their support. “Good Lord,” he said as he began peeling back a banana, “grant us favor today.”

As he drove on, eating his lunch and listening to all the breathless talk on the radio, Danny began growing anxious. It seemed as though someone was trying to tell him something. He reached over and killed the radio.

“What do you say, Lord?” Danny asked nonchalantly. “Who are You voting for today?”

The only reply coming was the sound of the rolling and running of the car as it rumbled down the road.

Danny smiled and reached for a piece of his wife’s zucchini bread. “I guess that’s right.”

“Well,” Danny said, keeping one eye on the road and the other on the Saran wrap encasing the zucchini bread, “I sure wish I could go in there and vote for You.”

“What do you mean?” the Lord replied loud and clear. “You’ve been voting for Me all day.”

It’ll be good to come into the house of the Lord tomorrow and share the communion meal with Him and each other. I can’t think of better medicine for all that ails us! And there’s so much more than that in store. God is so good! May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

  • Pastor Tate

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Homework for Tomorrow

Good evening church family,

Lisa and I homeschool our three children. Every year we purchase a curriculum for each of them and the kids work their way through it from September to early June. All the traditional subjects are studied, with a course on the Bible added in. In our little one-room-schoolhouse, Lisa does the lion’s share of the educating; serving as both teacher and principal. But I help out some. I oversee the biblical instruction for all three and handle the language arts coursework for the two girls. Each night I grade the day’s work and then after breakfast the next morning, I sit with each of the kids individually and go over any corrections I happened to make the previous night. Before heading out the door, I also go over their lessons for the day and outline their homework and assignments. It’s a lot of fun for me and I truly enjoy it. When Bryn, Ingrid, and Brooks take their turns sitting next to me at my spot at the table, I delight in the precious time together. As they learn about the world, I get a chance to learn about each of them. I find that one is all business while another is all squirm. One takes each stroke of red ink personally while another only yawns. One dials it in when something is confusing and hard to understand while another fragments in despair. Some tolerate my classroom humor but, sadly, none laugh at it.

We just recently began a new unit in Ingrid’s language arts course and the introductory page explained that poetry would be the main focus of the lessons over the coming weeks. Upon learning this, Ingrid slumped back in her chair; letting her head hit the backrest. “Oh, no,” she groaned as sympathetic groans echoed from her schoolmates seated around the dining room table. From Bryn’s previous tangles with poetry, a prejudicial dislike for rhythm, meter, and verse has unfortunately corrupted our institution. Of course – truth be told – I’m probably not the most inspiring teacher on the subject. I’ve never had a fondness for poetry and have always preferred prose. You’ll never find me jumping up and standing on the table while giving an impassioned recitation of Thomas or Keats. But both of my parents tried to instill within me a love for poetry and much of God’s inspired Word is in verse and so I’ve tried hard to gain an appreciation.

Well, we’re a week-or-so into it now and it’s not going all that badly. One of Ingrid’s lessons last week had her studying the diamond or “diamante” style poem. For those not familiar with this type of poetry, a diamond poem consists of sixteen words written on the page in the shape of a diamond. A noun is written at the top and center of the sheet; serving as the subject of the poem. Under it – also centered – come two adjectives. Beneath them – again, everything centered – three verbs are spaced out. In the middle are four nouns and then, in descending order, come three more verbs, two more adjectives, and then a final noun – the finished composition appearing in the shape of a diamond; the sixteen words painting a picture of the subject at the top. Ingrid and I went over the style and talked through some of the examples that were given. She didn’t seem too frustrated with the lesson until we began going over the day’s assignments. When I noted that she’d be expected to write a diamond poem of her own, Ingrid’s little outboard motor hit a rocky ledge; bending her propellers.

“C’mon, Dad,” she said, burying her right palm into her right cheek. “You’re not going to make me write one of these are you?”

“Honey,” I reply shaking my head, frustrated by the bad rap poetry’s gotten in our school, “it says you can write it about anything you want. You can write it about your dance class, ice cream, or Dude Perfect (our kids love watching Dude Perfect videos for some reason) – anything you want.”

“Fine,” she replied with a punchy tone; gloomily resigned to her fate. “I’m going to write it about you!”

“Perfect,” I replied with a grin; getting a little grin in return. “But just remember, I’m going to be the one grading it.”

That night, after bedtime reading (The Sign of the Beaver for Brooks and Sense and Sensibility for the girls), Lisa and I poured a little iced coffee for ourselves and headed downstairs to let the day ebb away in conversation, television, and grading. I looked forward to reading Ingrid’s poem. She’s got a good sense of humor and I fully expected her to come after me. But what I read instead really blessed me. Here’s her poem:

John

pastor dad

mowing raking shoveling

loving kind annoying cooker

planning talking thinking

husband compassion

nice

Now, I might have fared a whole lot worse than that and, in fact, I might never fare much better! I read and reread Ingrid’s poem as I sipped iced coffee and listened to the pellet stove crackle and blow. I really reveled in it, to be honest. It proved an unexpected blessing to have my child attempt to capture me in sixteen words and to find that the nouns, adjectives and verbs she used were evidence of a love and respect she had for me. After going over it with Ingrid the next day, I secretly snuck the poem out of her notebook and tucked it into mine. It’s been sitting on my desk at the office ever since.

As I continued to reflect on the poem, the thought occurred to me that I ought to try and write one for the Lord. Maybe He’d enjoy it if one of His children tried to capture Him in sixteen words. And so, I did. Here’s what I came up with:

Him

quick keen

watching waiting willing

ears arms eyes voice

hoisting helping healing

knowing close

mine

I handed it in to my Father and I hope He’s tacked it up somewhere on the beaver board over His desk. I hope it blesses His heart to have an expression of how He’s blessed my heart over and over and over again. As you prepare for worship tonight and tomorrow – why not write a little diamond poem of your own. Take sixteen words to bless your Dad today. I think you’ll both be blessed by the homework!

We’re looking forward to gathering together in the morning to worship our God and King and to fellowship in our citizenship in the eternal Kingdom of our Lord! It stands to be a wonderful time in the Lord’s house. May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

  • Pastor Tate
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Operator

Good morning church family,

“I’m sorry,” the disembodied voice on the other end of the line begins, “but the person you are trying to reach has a voicemail box that has not been set up yet. Please try again later. Goodbye.”

When she’s done giving me the bad news – and it’s always a woman’s voice that’s dispatched to do such a thing – she calmly and dispassionately hangs up on me. I take the phone away from my ear and look dumbly at the screen, the way a child looks at his mommy when his balloon floats away or when his ice cream falls out of the cone and onto the pavement. But my phone, like my mommy, only looks back at me blankly.

“Well,” I console myself, “at least they can see that I called. And – like she said – I can always try again later.”

I decide to place another call to another person. It rings and rings.

“I’m sorry,” the same female cyborg answers, “but the person you are trying to reach has a voicemail box that is full and cannot receive any more messages. Please try again later. Goodbye.”

In olden days I would have just put the handset back into its cradle on the wall, watched the cord twirl up in a bunch underneath, and walked merrily away. But now I just stare into the backlit abyss that is my smartphone; waiting for some notification to give me direction.

“I suppose I could send a text message,” I suggest to myself – a grimace appearing on my face. “I mean, they’ll see that I called but because I didn’t leave a voicemail – they won’t think it’s important. They’ll never call back.”

With a sigh of resignation, I open the text messaging app on my phone. “What I wouldn’t give for a piece of parchment, a quill pen, and an ink well right now,” I say to myself. “I’d scratch out a neat and tidy note with as elegant a hand as possible, nobly review the composition as the ink dries, bend the correspondence into a trifold crease, pour a dollop of hot wax over the fold, and carefully affix my seal into the wax. I’d then ring for my manservant who would ably dispatch a courier to deliver the message. Then, with the happy sound of the courier’s horse galloping away from my courtyard, I would return to the silent reverie of my study.”

Putting fantasy aside, I begin writing out the first text message. I labor over the introduction. Should I use “hey”, “hello”, or some other greeting? Should I use the person’s name? Would an exclamation mark be over the top? A comma be too formal? What about a smiley face emoji? Ugh – I hate it. Then there’s the body of the message to fool with. I prefer complete sentences and a strict adherence to grammatical standards but in the texting medium this feels something like wearing a suit and tie to a barbecue. So, I settle on the grammatical equivalent of business-casual – the jeans and untucked collared shirt of contractions, colloquialisms, and fragments. Brutal. Finally, there’s the conclusion to write. My instinct is to always give a proper benediction at the end of any message but, because texting is more akin to conversation than correspondence, a grand goodbye could appear as though I’m stiff-arming any future reply – I just sat down to dinner and I’m already standing up and putting my coat on to leave. But despite all these tortured ruminations, I manage to muddle through and prepare something for the send button.

As my clumsy thumbs are busy tapping it all out, the Lord looks over my shoulder and shares a thought with me. What He has to say isn’t the type of thing that demands my full attention – He’s happy to have me multitask as we talk. “Have you checked your voicemail box recently?” He says, perhaps trying to check some of my frustration and bring in a little humility.

“Hmm,” I utter my acknowledgement with a slight nod of the head, “that’s a good thought, I don’t remember clearing out my box anytime recently. I should do that.”

“I’m not talking about your phone, John,” the Lord says with crisper tone.

I don’t know about you, but when I get alone with the Lord – when I’m intentionally setting aside some “face to face” time, as it were – both God and I seem to have an agenda. I have things I want to share, vent about, and fellowship in. I usually have requests to make and I often seek some guidance of some kind. Sometimes all I really want is to enjoy the Lord’s company and be blessed by some of His undivided attention. God is so loving and patient – He almost always allows me to go through my entire agenda with Him. But, as I said, He almost always has things He wants to do and accomplish as well. He often begins His portion of our meeting by reviewing old business – things that we’d discussed in previous meetings and which I’d promised to take care of. I know this is coming and I try to have taken action lest I spend the entire time squirming. There are usually some words of encouragement and some new business too – things He’d like for me to begin aligning my heart, mind, and energies with. But the agenda item that He’s most sure to cover is the one that deals with necessary areas of correction in my life. He’s faithful to point out for me things that He’s unhappy with and that I need to change.

I suddenly realize that this is what God is referring to when He asks about my “voicemail box”. It didn’t happen overnight and I wasn’t even entirely conscious of it at first; but I had begun managing my times alone with the Lord in such a way that He wasn’t afforded the opportunity to chasten and discipline me anymore. For instance, I adopted a blanket confession of sin that I would make at the beginning of each of our meetings. This was heartfelt actually and usually accompanied by a sincerely penitent bending of the knee. “That ought to cover it,” I’d assure myself. I also began only allowing a proxy to cover most of the Lord’s agenda – restricting His voice to Scriptures of my own choosing and readings of His saints that serve only to provide glancing blows here and there. But, as moderator, I was careful to make sure the meeting passed at such a pace that the Spirit was never allowed the floor. Awful. But perhaps the most underhanded of all my changes was the way I began scheduling our times together with a hard break at the end. I have a 9 o’clock appointment, let’s say, and so I begin my time with God at 8:45. There’s just enough time for my items and, “Oops, we’ll have to circle back on anything You might want to bring up later, Lord.”

But of course, “later” almost never comes. And now my voicemail box is full of important messages that I haven’t listened to and I’ve changed my quiet time in such a way so as to disable the function of Heavenly messaging altogether. This is how you end up having prophets coming to you with stories about pet lambs and such and how you end up with matted hair that looks like feathers, fingernails as long as claws, and grass stuck between your teeth.

So, I put my phone down and look God in the eye again. Thankfully – mercifully – the call comes through.

What a wonderful blessing from God is the family of God! God wouldn’t have any of His children be orphans in this world but ensures that each is given a home to belong to, to be nurtured in, and to blessed by. And what a wonderful home is ours! I look forward to a rollicking time in the living room tomorrow morning! Until then – may the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

  • Pastor Tate
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Cutting Back the Puckerbrush

Good morning church family,

Just shy of the turn that would take him up the Stage Road and past the church, Sandin heard sirens wailing from behind. Easing the right-side tires onto the soft shoulder, Sandin looked in the rearview mirror and saw a Bolton town cop car kicking up dust and closing fast on his position; its blue strobes flashing wildly. A Bolton fire truck was not far behind it, roaring and rumbling as it came. Coming to a complete stop, Sandin watched the emergency vehicles blitz by. The speed of the fire truck shook his sedan as it whooshed past; the sound of its big diesel engine reverberating in his chest. A quick check again in the rearview mirror revealed a second fire truck several hundred yards back and coming at a quick pace. Sandin kept his foot on the brake and looked distractedly out the passenger-side window. There, just inside the tree line and only a few paces from the shoulder, stood a road sign. Untrimmed tree limbs and unchecked sumac and puckerbrush had threatened to completely obscure the sign from passing motorists. Attempting to peer through the foliage, Sandin leaned across the armrest. The metal sign post stood about seven-feet-tall with a little sign bolted to the top of it. Looking intently at the weathered block letters spaced neatly in three careful rows, Sandin was able to make it out. “BOLTON BIBLE CHURCH,” the sign read. Below the message was an arrow directing traffic and at the top of the sign a simple, white cross blazed the blue background.

“Hmm,” Sandin thought to himself. “I’ve never noticed that sign before.”

Sandin wasn’t from Connecticut. He’d grown up in Southern California and gone to college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He met a girl from Vermont while studying there and the two fell in love and were married not long after graduation. After a successful internship at Raytheon, he was offered a job in aerospace technology at one of their offices in Connecticut. Sandin and his wife settled in the town of Bolton; eventually buying a house and starting a family. They’d been there almost nine years now and they loved it. Growing up in church and having been baptized at an early age, Sandin’s faith had always been an important part of his life. Upon moving to Bolton, he began looking for a church before he’d even begun trying to get the power and cable TV turned on at the house. He and his wife had worshipped around for a bit before settling in at Bolton Bible Church.

Bolton Bible was a non-denominational, very Evangelical fellowship of conservative Christians. It was not a large group – maybe sixty or seventy souls in attendance on a good Sunday. But they were a wonderful family of earnest and loving believers who cared for each other and maintained a steadfast commitment to the Gospel. Bolton Bible was led by a quiet, well-spoken, and sincere pastor who spent the lion’s share of his time in his well-appointed study. The pastor did almost all of his socializing, counseling, teaching, and connecting from the pulpit on Sunday and the lectern on Wednesday night. Consequently, he was not well-known to his people but they revered him and were genuinely grateful to God for the blessing of such a studious and scholarly shepherd to watch over them.

The town of Bolton was well-settled and home to a population of highly educated, upwardly mobile, affluent New Englanders. It was a pretty leafy little town – mostly homes and neighborhoods. There wasn’t much by way of commerce and industry aside from a couple of nondescript office buildings and a shopping center set well-off of the road. The church building, which was a neat and elegant construction in the classical colonial style, fit in well. The church people did a good job keeping up the building and grounds and most townspeople regarded the church as affectionately as they did the big red barn and silo belonging to the only remaining farm in town. But as far as the unbelieving public was concerned, the church’s building wasn’t much more than a bit of civic décor and its members nothing but harmless stewards of a sentimental heritage.

As the second firetruck thundered by, Sandin checked his mirrors before climbing back up onto the pavement and taking the turn onto the Stage Road. As he drove past the church building, the pastor’s pickup was the lone car in the lot. Sandin thought some more about that sign back on Hammonasset Avenue. “It must have been important enough to someone,” he thought to himself, “to go to all the trouble of having that sign made and approved by the town and installed and all.” He drove a few hundred yards in silence; the quiet humming of his Audi’s engine the only soundtrack. “And now,” the uncomfortable line of thinking continued, “that sign must not be important to anyone.”

That Sunday at church, Sandin asked around about the sign. Many, like him, were unaware of its existence.

Jacob Lohr, one of the elders, knew all about it. “Oh yeah,” he began, folding his arms and putting one hand under his chin, “there’s actually three of ‘em – maybe only two now. There’s the one down there on Hammonasset and I know there’s one over on Cranston where it connects to Stage. The one that was back off the bypass; I think that one got taken out by a plow years ago. But anyway – yeah, we had those put up years ago when miss Evelyn Sylvester was still with us. She insisted on it. ‘Maybe no one will ever come because of them,’ she used to say, ‘but they won’t forget we’re here and it never hurts to see the cross.’” Elder Lohr dropped his arms and put his hands back in his pockets. “We sure had a devil of a time getting those things approved by the Bolton Town Board.”

Over the next couple of weeks, the shrouded church sign continued to bother Sandin. He’d become determined to do something about it. It wouldn’t take more than an hour’s worth of work to cut back the encroaching woods but he wanted to check in with the pastor before doing anything; just in case the project was booby trapped in some way that he couldn’t see. That Sunday he waited to talk to the pastor after the service and filled him in on the situation.

“So,” Sandin said, holding a blueberry muffin in one hand; his Bible tucked under one arm and his one-year-old girl cradled in the other, “what do you think? Any reason I can’t go down there and cut all that back and make our sign visible again?”

“No,” the pastor said, a keen earnestness in his countenance, “you most certainly can. There’s one long easement running the length of Hammonasset. But I’m not sure why you’d want people to see that sign in the first place.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that, Pastor,” Sandin said, a quizzical look on his face as he allowed his little girl to pick off another piece of muffin.

“Well, Sandin, all I mean to say is that I think we have some other trimming we ought to do first before we go directing anyone to come see any of us. I mean our witness and testimony as a people has gotten pretty overgrown with our own brush and weeds these days. That sign only directs people to a building and, as you know, buildings don’t say much.” The pastor looked out the window that offered a view out onto the Stage Road. “God’s made each and every one of us into a sign. And my goodness – we sure need to get our gospel showing again.”

We’re looking forward to gathering in God’s house tomorrow morning to share in fellowship with one another and in communion with Him. I’m so glad we’re all a part of the family of God and I’m so grateful for the blood of Jesus Christ that makes going home again possible. Praise the Lord for His goodness and mercy!!! May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

  • Pastor Tate
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