Which End of the String?
Ministerial Meandering
Which end of the string?
I was once lucky enough to go to India to teach. It is also possible that you are unlucky enough for me to have told you about this before. For which I should probably apologize - but I’m not going to, because I can’t remember what I wrote, and I bet you can’t either.
Last Sunday’s theme of the ‘Good Shepherd’ is what brought me back to India - not that I remember seeing any sheep in India, although there were multitudes of different sorts of animals wandering the streets - goats, buffalo, dogs - so there may well have been sheep there too. But the sheep I want to tell you about were human.
Having arrived in the middle of the night, and negotiated the street dogs of Ahmedabad, whose job it is to welcome visitors and threaten all vehicle tyres of whatever description, I was deposited into a crumbly and sleepy hotel along with the rest of our teaching faculty. Way before dawn I was aware of the increasing crescendo of traffic beneath my window on one side of the hotel, and waste ground on the other. But dawn comes quickly in the tropics.
Looking down at the maelstrom of hurtling metal that appeared to have only one speed - insane - my eye was drawn to what might be called (in any ‘normal’ country) the centre of a roundabout. Here, it was simply an encumbrance on the road, and in the way of all traffic approaching it from all directions at v=c/n, (that is the speed of light in a medium.) Most traffic managed to swerve around it, but that was by no means guaranteed.
On this perilous perch was a small girl of about 6 or 7, who held a piece of string in her hand, which was tied around her tiny wrist. On the other end of the string was a blind man who also had it tied around his wrist, and behind him was second blind man who had his hand on the shoulder of the first man. Behind the second blind man was a third, also holding the shoulder of the man in front.
With a sense of disbelief I watched as the little girl stepped off the dubious safety of the island, and began to walk slowly but steadily across this circus of sudden death, her entourage following without hesitation. It wasn’t as though a single vehicle slowed or stopped, but by some miracle they all made it to the safety of a sidewalk - if it could be named such - about 50 feet away.
Moses’ parting of the Red Sea would have been less dramatic in terms of risk, as we know the ‘Israelites crossed on dry land’. Here, this little girl and her posse of blind men crossed a relentless and lethal hail of vehicles unscathed.
The significance of this event seems profound to me; whose was the greater trust? The little girl’s - in that she trusted that she could lead these men to safety? Or that of the men who may or may not have known who was leading them?
Sometimes the ‘valley of the shadow of death’ can come in many different forms - but then, so can Jesus.
Philip+