Where I Live - Redux

My mom was recently in a pretty serious car accident.  She’s doing better, but still has a long way to go, so your prayers for her continued recovery have been and are most definitely welcome.

Coming back home to Virginia on Monday after having been at her bedside virtually uninterrupted since December 22, I drove past where the accident happened and contemplated the vagaries of time and place.

In this time and this place, words of care are expressed in ways direct and indirect.

I learned of my mother’s accident as I was preparing to walk out the door to officiate an evening worship service.  The voice on the other end of the phone was the wife of another pastor.  It turns out that a lay pastor over in West Virginia, where the accident happened, had heard a paramedic say the woman in the accident’s daughter was a minister in McDowell.  David called Darlene to ask if she thought that was me.  Sure it was, Darlene called me to give me the bad news.

The next day, desperate to get to the hospital, I plotted a course the long way round the snow-covered roads made largely impassable and contemplated what to do about upcoming services – particularly Christmas Eve.  Someone suggested we cancel as there are a number of services on Christmas Eve in the area and our folks could attend another service easily.  That’s what we did.  Turned out virtually no one had services as the snow continued unabated the next days, leaving the community together in their apart-ness.

Calling the radio station to ask them to announce our cancellation, the congregant calling was asked if it was okay to say the reason why and to ask for prayers for my mom.  And so it was that the whole county has been praying for my mom.

There have been many other acts of kindness in these days, but for now, I am grateful that I live in a time when and a place where the radio station issues prayer concerns for a fallen one and folks go out of their way to get you the news you need to know, where the degrees of separation are small and largely irrelevant when it comes to crisis.