Thirty
years ago this summer I got my driver’s license. In those three decades I have
driven some interesting vehicles, some interesting places, and some interesting
miles. But nothing I have ever driven matches what I experienced last Monday.
Coming across Interstate 80 west out of Illinois close to the Iowa border I saw
a deep purple blush spread across the horizon. I said to myself, “That doesn’t
look good.” Little did I know how not good it would turn out to be. If you have
followed the news this week you have heard of it by now, no doubt. A derecho.
Derecho, derived from the Spanish word
for “straight”, is the equivalent of a straight line tornado or hurricane. Tornados
whirl in a circular fashion, dashing haphazardly across the landscape. Hurricanes
revolve around an eye, dumping multiple inches of rain as they slowly
deteriorate over land. Derechos howl straight across the plains. Birthed in a
line of thunderstorms, they morph into something bigger than the sum of their parts.
Hurricanes make landfall after days of breathless news commentary. Sirens howl
to warn us of possible tornados. Derechos, like dogs gone suddenly mad, simply
attack and batter into submission everything in their path, a path that extends
on a wide front for hundreds of miles. …and that is what I was driving straight
into, unbeknownst to me, five days ago.
Seated beside me in the front seat of
the van was my eleven year old son, Sam. In the seat immediately behind me was
my eighteen year old son, Jack. In the back seat was my sixteen year old
daughter, Emma. My passengers, my family, my life. It was about 1:30 PM. As the
light of the brilliant August sun faded to darkness the wind began to pick up.
Leaves and twigs began to fly through the air. The air began to physically push
the van sideways, buffeting it in short bursts. Off to the left, in the dust of
a ditch, I briefly saw a small dust devil form. Raising my eyes to the rearview
mirror I snapped to Jack, “Check for a tornado warning, will you?” Our phones
were silent. I did not know the local radio channels. I had no idea what was
ahead of me. It was probably better that way.
Jack informed me he could not find any
tornado warning on his weather app, just a radar line of strong rain stretching
ahead of us. By now, the rain had begun to pick up. Blown by the wind in
sheets, the waves of drops raced across the interstate ahead of us. Around us,
traffic began to slow. I raised my wipers to the highest setting, fumbled for
my lights, and slowed with them. Ok. Bad storm. Been there, done that lots of
times in the hundreds of thousands of miles I have driven in the last thirty
years.
Then the derecho hit us. What had been
waves of rain became a solid mass of water. I was no longer in a van. It was a
submarine. Water not falling, but hurling itself at the van coming from the
passenger side. Attacking us like all the fiends of hell scrambling to gain
purchase on a lost soul. The wind no longer buffeted the van; it propelled itself
against the side, pushing us inexorably from the slow lane into the fast lane.
It was not a wind anymore. It was a force, like gravity gone sideways. Risking
one brief glance into the rearview mirror, I could not see Emma. She was still
laying down. Raising my voice I snapped, “Everybody, seat belts on, now!” Her
head popped up. She knows me, heard the soberness in my voice, and she and Jack
obliged. In the front seat, Sam’s was already on. The darkness faded toward
night. Around us, vehicles began to pull off to the berm, huddling for purchase
under bridges, under the lee side of a small hill. I kept driving.
Someone asked me this week, “Why didn’t
you pull over?” Good question. Several things were running through my head.
First, I do not like the idea of parking in bad visibility on the side of an
interstate. Too easy to get slammed from behind. Nor did I want to shelter
beside some small hill on which trees were. Dimly through the dark and the
rain, I could see trees bent in unearthly shapes, all facing one direction. No
way those were all going to hold and I did not want a tree coming down on the
van. But more than that, a sixth sense kept me going. When you have forward
momentum you can manage a sideways push better. You can attack it by angling
your steering wheel off kilter sort of like mowing a self-propelled lawnmower
on a hill. The gravity drags you down but the engine drives you forward while
the sideways tilt keeps you in a straight line. The wind, clocked variously along
that section of the Illinois/Iowa border at 90 to 100 miles per hour, was not
gusting against the side of the van. It was brutalizing us with an unvaried
intensity. I have never seen anything like it.
So on we went. It was the only thing
to do, the safest thing to do I thought. Beside me, Sam began to cry. He has
had a hard year in his eleven year old life. His emotions lie close to the
surface. Fear had him now. The derecho chased him mere inches from his face.
The other two were deathly silent. I straightened my seat up, gripped the
steering wheel with both arms so tightly my left arm still hurt late into the
night, and went forward. It was beyond my experience but I had no choice. I was
in it. Correction, we were in it. I was responsible for them. I did not know
what I was facing. I could not ask for help. I could not go around it. I could
not avoid it. With little information, with the situation deteriorating from
bad to worse, with it all on the line all I could do was go forward the best I
could.
It seemed like hours. In retrospect,
it was more like thirty minutes. I moved at about thirty miles an hour west. It
raced past me a hundred miles an hour heading east. You do the math.
Eventually, I80 came to a complete stop. Too many semis blown over sideways for
traffic to continue even after the derecho passed. Getting off the interstate,
we drove the river roads along the Mississippi north toward Dubuque. Town after
town, no power. Town after town, trees toppled into houses and cars. Town after
town, power lines draped the road. Lines of traffic snaking through the
obstacle courses that used to be called streets. Eventually, we made it home.
I lay in bed that night trying to find
a way to communicate to my wife how bad it had been. The wordsmith in me could
not come up with the words. Later, as her regular breathing told me she had
fallen asleep, I wept. Unbidden, there came to my mind the realization this situation
has become my entire life.
In January, I read in the news that
China had put an entire urban area on lockdown due to a new respiratory virus.
Ahead of me, I saw a deep purple blush on the horizon and I said to myself, “This
can’t be good.” Little did I know how not good it would turn out to be. As a
pastor, I reacted sooner than most of my contemporaries. Several years ago I
read John Barry’s “The Great Influenza”. I knew what SARS was. I paid attention
to Ebola. I made decisions for my family and for my church that later proved to
be good ones. Essentially, I did the equivalent of turning my lights on, asking
my son for a tornado check, calling for the seat belts to be put on, slowing
down, gripping the wheel with both hands. I have pastored for twenty-three
years. I have been through some storms. All of that was within my experience.
But as the calendar turned from January to February and then to March, I had no
idea what I was driving into. No one did. The coronavirus pandemic is beyond
anyone’s experience.
For six months, I have been steering
my church through a storm. Its howling winds have torn church members from me,
driven them into sin. Pinned by events, I have been unable to do the things I
would normally do as a pastor to address the situation. Watching in horror, I
see them whirling, tumbling end over end spiritually, away in the dark.
Ministries are pulled off on the side of the road, perhaps never to start up
again. I have seen more missionaries resign in the last six months than I have
seen resign in the last six years. Like the big rigs on the interstate, some
churches bull ahead as if immune to the weather. It does not surprise me to see
them piled up in a heap in a ditch a few miles up the road. This is different.
It is not just another storm. We are in a derecho. It howls, demonically, against your
church and mine. And your pastor and I have no choice but to drive forward, in
terrible conditions, with nothing in our experience like this experience, white knuckles planted on the steering
wheel, begging God for wisdom and grace, unable to adequately comfort those
weeping beside us, no real idea when the storm will pass, all that we love and
live for contained in a fragile vehicle called a church, relentlessly tormented
by a pandemic and all its associated media-driven, internet-aggravated,
politically-toxic, church-splitting pandemic ferocity.
…which brings me finally to my point,
the thought that rolled around in my head as I vainly sought sleep last Monday
night. As bad as it was, how much worse would it have been if Jack, Emma, and
Sam had begun to fight with each other? How much worse would have it been if,
in the middle of a literal disaster, they had begun to fight with me? Openly
disagreeing with my decisions, yelling at each other for the other’s response
to the storm, competing with each other, vociferously calling for me to heed
their abhorrently timed advice thrown at me from the back seat? It very easily
could have pushed me over the balanced knife edge I was on as it was. But they
did not. I do not know if they agreed with my decision to ask them to put
seatbelts on or not. I do not know if they agreed with my decision to continue
driving forward through the storm or not. I do not know if they agreed with my
decision to essentially ignore my weeping son beside me so I could focus on the
storm or not. Blessed be God, they did not tell me. They just followed my
instructions, regardless of what they felt, and kept quiet. My job was
impossibly hard enough as it was. I thank God they did not make it any harder. If
they had, it just might have killed us all.
Beloved, your pastor is driving through a storm. It is worse than anything he has ever experienced. He has been and is being forced to make snap decisions with bad information, decisions he has no idea of the actual effects. He cannot not make decisions. And whatever he does will produce disagreement. He will stop ministries you think he should continue. He will continue others you think he should stop. Masks? Service schedules? Budget priorities? Sermon choices? Personnel decisions? The seniors, the youth, the parents, the spiritual, the carnal, the active, the belligerent, saints of all sorts are seated there in his church (or watching along at home) critiquing his every move.
Pray. Follow his lead. And be quiet.
He is doing the absolute best he can.
Let him drive. The Lord will see us through.
