When The Chariot Is Offered, Get In

"When The Chariot Is Offered, Get In"
Acts 8:26-40


Lately, I’ve been thinking about getting off Facebook.  I’ve never been a big fan, anyway.  I have become increasingly uncomfortable about putting even a little bit of myself out there in some kind of splashy self-disclosure.  I have friends that throw nearly everything they do on their Facebook page, every meal they eat, every movement or facial expression of their two children.  I just don’t see the point.  I am becoming less and less infatuated with myself as I grow older.  And yet our culture is becoming more and more narcissistic, as if we are more and more under the delusion that everyone must be interested in what we are doing or thinking.  I find my life to be much too boring to splash any of it out there for people to see.

Blogging is another part of this whole social media phenomenon.  How many don’t know what blogging is?  Blog is a shortened word, compressing two terms: web log.  Web logs, or blogs, were started by a couple of teenagers on an obscure web site.  They started writing their personal diary of personal activities and thoughts hanging it out there for anyone to read.  No one knew who they were, but anyone could read their blog--all their deep dark secrets and the daily activities of their lives.  It quickly caught on as a way for people to totally disclose their inner selves (or make something up), and yet do it without anyone know who they are.

Now blogging has caught on to such an extent that millions of people are doing it.  They aren’t trying to keep themselves invisible like the original two teenagers did, but want everyone to know who they are.  We don’t have reporters anymore, but bloggers.  People are now professional bloggers!  So, somehow the news is not just the news, but someone’s personal take on the news.  Opinion and news mixed together.  We have become a society of social voyeurs, reading and checking in with people’s personal lives and thoughts through their blog, without every knowing them.

I just think it’s all fascinating, psychologically.  People wanting others to know what’s going on in their lives and heads, but at the same time keeping their identity hidden.  It seems to me that people have a great need to be heard, to have someone listen to their story.  At the same time, I think people, by telling their story, are deeply longing for guidance and wisdom about their stories.  They’re trying to figure out what their story means, what the meaning of certain events were, and to come to some understanding of how everything fits together.  And, basically, where it’s all going.

Philip was one of those kinds of people who God used as just that kind of spiritual guide.  The Holy Spirit propelled him from place-to-place, putting him in contact with people who needed to be listened to, who needed God’s guidance.

One occasion was with the Ethiopian who had been reading from the prophet Isaiah.  The Ethiopian was spiritually hungry and needing someone to hear his story and help him make sense of it.  It’s not hard to be a Philip for others.  All it takes is the willingness to listen, and then let the Spirit guide your conversation.

A few years ago, I flew out to Seattle to attend a Presbyterian Men’s Conference.  Earl Palmer, Senior Pastor of University Presbyterian Church in Seattle was the main speaker, and he is always worth the journey.

The three months prior to my trip were emotionally draining.  In one two-and-a-half week stretch I had 6 funerals.  It was unbelievable.  I was looking forward to just relaxing, and being fed spiritually on this trip--not having to be the Pastor for the week.

But in my prayers, just before leaving, I prayed something I shouldn’t have prayed.  It fell within the bounds of the old saying, “Never ask something of God that he just might give you.”  The prayer I prayed was that God would somehow use me during the week.

I flew out of Omaha to Denver for the first leg of the trip.  When I checked in, the gate attendant looked up at me and said, “Whoa, we need to put you in a different seat.”  She got me into the exit row so I could have more leg room.  I found out God put me there for a different reason.

When I settled into my aisle seat, there was a young (20 something) woman in the window seat.  No one was sitting between us.  During the flight she sat and stared out the window.  I kind of settled back and started reading a Newsweek magazine that had a feature article about the power of prayer.

After we had been in the air for a while, she pulled out a Bible and began reading.  I thought, “Oh, boy.”  She would read for a few minutes, place her hand on her Bible’s pages, let out a deep sigh, and look out the window.  After she had done this a few times, I thought, “Oh, boy.”  And I remembered my prayer earlier that morning.  I, with slight reluctance, turned to her and said, “I see you’re reading the Good Book.”
“Oh yes,” she replied.  “It’s the best book.”
“Are you a Christian?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, and then asked if I was a Christian.  I said that I most assuredly am.
I asked her what she was reading, and she read to me out of the first chapter of Isaiah:
This is God’s Message:
If your sins are blood-red,
they’ll be snow-white.
If they’re red like crimson,
they’ll be like wool.
If you’ll willingly obey,
you’ll feast like kings.
But if you’re willful and stubborn,
you’ll die like dogs.
That’s right.  God says so.  (1:18-20)

I asked her why those were the verses she was reading, and what particular meaning she was finding in them.  She went silent for about three or four minutes, shaking her head back and forth, looking at me, looking down at her Bible, shaking her head back and forth.  All the while patting the pages of her Bible.  I thought to myself, “Oh, boy.”

Then she spoke.  She told me the story of how she had had a falling out with her mother as a teenager.  She had run away from home.  While hitchhiking to Florida, she was picked up by a couple of men who raped her.  She explained to me how she had always felt guilty about that, as if the rape was somehow her fault.  She had worked through some of those feelings, but it was clear they were still plaguing her.  She had never told her mother what happened.  Had barely talked to her mother since running away, but was traveling now to see her mother again.  That was one of the reasons she was reading Isaiah’s words about being washed “white as snow.”

She was struggling with the will of God in some other matters in her life.  She was faced with a decision that she anticipated would bring a lot of disorientation in her life.  She wanted to make the right choice.  She wanted to be sure she was paying attention to the voice of the Lord as she made her decision.

Just like the Ethiopian to Philip, she was saying to me, “How can I know without some help?”  Like the Ethiopian, she was allowing me into her chariot to help her understand what she was reading, and to guide her in her life direction.  And at the same time she was trying to help me understand what she saw in the scripture and why it was so important to her.  I chatted with her about both the situations she was struggling with.

After a while she asked me what my work was.  I told her I was a Pastor.  She laughed and said, “And here I was asking you if you were a Christian, but you’re a pastor!”  She thought that was funny.  I did too.  I asked if we could pray together, and as the plane was landing in Denver, we joined hands and I prayed for the healing of her past and that awful memory, as well as the choice she would have to make about a life shift.  And she prayed for my ministry.  She went her way, and I went mine.  Just two lives intersecting for a time by God’s bidding, brought about by the rearranging of my seat assignment by an unsuspecting gate attendant.

On my flight from Denver to Seattle, I struck up a conversation with a woman who had been staying with her daughter in Denver.  Her daughter had come down with a TB-like disease and had almost died.  The woman was clearly worn out from watching her grandchildren and watching her only daughter almost die of a mysterious disease.

“Then,” said the woman, “to top all that off, we have a cat.  It’s 15 years old and it’s nine lives have long been spent.  We just recently spent $600 keeping it alive.  My husband called just before I left Denver to tell me he had to have our cat put to sleep.”

It was clear the woman had a deep attachment to that cat and was experiencing deep grief.  She had almost lost her daughter, and now lost her cat.  In her mind she was approaching the loss of her cat with the somewhat logical point of view that, “If I’m going to have to lose a beloved on this trip, I’d rather it be my cat than my daughter.”

Then she curtly said, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”  She settled back in her seat and closed her eyes.  After the plane landed and everyone got up trying to get off like a bunch of claustrophobics, I pulled inside myself and said a quick prayer for the woman and her family, for her grief, and that the Holy Spirit would be with her and her daughter.  And I thanked God again that he had allowed me to get into another person’s chariot.


While at the conference, I got into a conversation at lunch one day with a young Korean pastor.  He was just starting out in ministry.  He had so much energy and enthusiasm about doing the Lord’s work.  He asked me all kinds of questions that compared my rural ministry with his inner city ministry experience.

He wanted to do ministry so well.  His strategy was to involve the whole congregation at once in big projects.  Like building a Habitat For Humanity house.  Instead of splitting the congregation up into small groups, which is the current “cool” way of doing ministry, he wanted everyone to work together.

He asked some important questions about the role of the minister and how to avoid the potholes many ministers fall into.  We talked for about an hour and a half during lunch and beyond.  It was probably one of the most energizing conversations I had the whole conference.  He gleaned some wisdom from my many years of experience.  And I re-caught from him some of the enthusiasm for serving Christ.  In a way, the Holy Spirit led us into each other’s chariots, and we both went away blessed.  I never saw him again during the conference after our conversation.

On the way home, I had a two hour lay over in Denver.  When I got there, I discovered my flight to Omaha had been arbitrarily canceled.  I had to get booked on another airline going that direction.  I should have realized I was being set up again for an invitation into yet another chariot.

I went to the gate from which my new flight would depart, and started my long wait.  I did some people watching, and then pulled out my journal to write down some reflections about my week.

A middle-aged woman sat down across from me and noticed my journal.  She asked if it was a journal.  I told her it was.  She asked me what I used it for.  I told her it was my most therapeutic tool; that I kept my journal most faithfully during the times of crisis in my life when I needed to be able to look back and put some pieces together.  Gain some perspective.  That I used it to try and discern how God was working and moving in my life.  Discovering God’s invisible hand in my very visible and sometimes chaotic life.

She said, “Maybe I should do something like that.”  I asked her what she would write about.  She looked down at the stained carpet at her feet for a long time.  Then she looked up and said, “I’ve been courageously trying to look back at a painful time in my life.”  She stopped and stared at me for a moment, trying to assess if I was a safe person to say more about that.  Her assessment done, she said, “I began to be sexually abused when I was five and six years old.”  My heart ached for her as she told me her story and how utterly painful it was, even for me as I listened to it.

She began to cry and through her tears she asked me some angry questions:  “Where was God then?  Why wasn’t God protecting me?  Why did God let it happen over and over?”

I was quickly in tears, crying with the woman I had just met at an airport gate.  She was covered with guilt and shame and anger, like an oil that no soap could wash off no matter how hard and how many times she had scrubbed.

I talked to her about, how, when I wrestled with those kinds of questions, I do so through prayer.  We talked about prayer, and how her journal writing could be a form of praying.  How it’s OK to shake your fist at God sometimes.  To cry out your laments.  To even, through our journal, wish pain and worse upon those who had been your tormentors.  That all of that is splayed across the pages of the Bible, especially the Psalms.  I told her that I believed that even though she was angry at God, and that God was big enough to take her anger, it was by God, ultimately, that she would find her healing.

I prayed quietly with her, and I don’t know if she was comforted by my counsel or not.  The announcement came over the PA that it was the last call to board my flight.  I hadn’t been paying attention, and now I had to go and be spirited away by a Boeing 737.  I had to leave her there still with tears trickling down her cheeks.


All in all, an amazing week.  They were all one time conversations, deeply personal, with people who deeply desired for someone to hear and care about their stories, but not through some anonymous blog.  All opportunities provided by God.


The Ethiopian left his encounter with Philip a changed man, a man baptized as a Christian convert.  Had Philip prayed, “Use me, Lord, somehow this day, this week?”  I don’t know if I left any of those people changed.  I only know I tried to be faithful to God in the opportunities--the chariots, if you will--that God placed me in.  I find myself playing out the role of Philip often enough, especially when I ask God to give me opportunity.

There are other times I am the Ethiopian.  I’m having a hard time understanding things, or need counsel as I face my own difficulties.  I know that God will maneuver someone my way, to jump into my chariot and help me according to my need.

I know that all of us disciples are available to each other, as God spirits us into some contact, some opportunity for face-to-face conversation that will help another person connect with God.  To help another person move closer to God’s healing and truth.  May the Lord use you in that work, as you purpose to make yourself available.  When you sense the opportunity, may you take advantage of it.  In other words, when the chariot is offered, get in.