A Stranger in a Strange Land

Our taxi driver took off with all the confidence of a presidential candidate, as sure of his destination as if he had been there a thousand times.  Away we went through verdant jungle and frequent coco plantations occasionally interplanted with corn or avocados.  We sped on over hills and through scattered villages, past a tied up donkey, a road kill cow and a jocular police checkpoint.

As we came to a split in the highway, the previously confident driver turned to me and asked, in very broken English, "Which way?" 

"Which way?!" I thought. How should I know?  I’ve never been to this part of Mexico before.  Neither had my wife, Diane.  But Diane immediately picked up the fallen confidence of our driver, giving driving directions in very broken Spanish, and off we went again.

Perhaps suspecting I might be suspicious of his motivation, after all this was Mexico and we have all heard the horrific taxi stories, our driver pointed to a cubby in his dashboard where a small book was enshrined.  I slid the little book from its special place.  It had a very familiar feel and heft to it, but I could not read the title, which was, of course printed in Spanish.  So I flipped it open and saw a familiar word at the top of the page—Samuel!  It was a Bible.  I had opened it to the section named for the prophet Samuel.

What apprehension I had, subsided.  The prophet Samuel sometimes didn’t know which way to go either.  He picked Saul to be King of Israel, which turned into a disaster before he finely picked David.  By faith and not perfection Samuel had fulfilled God’s desire.

After stopping two more times to ask directions, we arrived safely at our little hotel on the beach.  But we had more with us than when we set out.  I don’t know if our driver was a conservative, or a liberal or somewhere in between, but we had shared with a stranger, without spoken words, the assurance of safety and comfort that comes with a common faith.

God is always communicating with the creation, but the power of scripture comes from a community of faith that makes it authoritative in their lives.  Without a community accepting it as authoritative it has no power whatsoever.  It has no power sitting on a coffee table or a bookcase or stashed away in a closet.  It has no power even if you dust it once a week.  It must be opened, read, understood and applied to have value.  And that takes effort.  Let’s begin a conversation around this sacred scripture we call the Bible.

Rev. Steve Islander

Rev. Islander is the pastor of the , but the writings on this blog are statements of his opinion alone and do not necessarily reflect those of all in his congregation.  It wouldn’t be a very interesting church if they did.