Earlier this week, The Niece stayed home from school with a cold.  Sure, she was missing a quantum physics test and a crucial lecture on DNA synthesis, but what can you do?  I drove over to baby-sit for a couple of hours while The Sis did some work from home (i.e., shop at anthropologie.com).  As I was gearing up to leave, The Sis turned on the TV and there upon the screen glowed a classic episode of Beverly Hills, 90210. Being Experts on All Things Pop Culture, 1990s Edition, The Sis and I immediately recognized that this was The One Where Dylan’s Dad Explodes.  We groaned with knowing trepidation when Dylan took the call from Kelly and his dad went out to move the car.  And as the flames lit up the screen, we remembered that we were not alone in the room, and we turned to The Niece.  Who was not only watching the tragedy unfold from her Bumbo Baby Seat, but gazing with eyes wide and mouth in an “Oh!” shape and just the hint of a smile on the corners of her lips.  And the fear that we were beholding the birth of a pyromaniac gave way to laughter at her enthrallment with this box that plays her two favorite shows: 90210 and football.

The scene was not so funny a couple of days later on my way to work..  Rain slicked the streets and wiped the “Ability to Drive” section of everyone’s brains clean, and I found myself wondering why work is something everyone simultaneously complains about and rushes to get to.  I imagined myself and the surrounding cars as components of a pinball machine, veering and swerving our way around the thickening traffic, but with an added and overblown sense of control over our paths.  Water pelted my windshield and a car cut me off and I congratulated myself for, rather than flipping the driver off, giving him a very sarcastic double thumbs-up instead–God is at work in me!  But you’re still a jackass–and as the road ahead filled with red brake lights and the sky above filled with angry gray clouds I knew that something was going to have to be bigger than what my eyes told me if my attitude stood any chance of being salvaged.

And in the midst of the deluge, I remembered that I know someone who is great at walking on water.

My newly opened mind recalled the words I had read just minutes before. Hebrews 11, the Hall of Fame for Faith.  A chapter full of liars, adulterers, prostitutes, and murderers–who were noted not for their record of wrongs, but for their willingness to keep believing.  Despite floods, unborn children, unreached lands, and–I would imagine–traffic.  And all that kept them going was all they couldn’t see.  A steady gaze beyond the road that lay ahead.  Because this is not a God whose raw materials are limited to what’s in my line of vision.

“What is seen was not made out of what was visible.”  I think about all the wars that are waged and hopes that are lost because of an unwillingness to admit there can be more.

And then I remembered the one who was born son to a carpenter and therefore a carpenter himself, because that’s how it worked then, and I try to imagine but I can’t even conceive of it: how it felt to head to the workshop every day, hidden knowledge of what lay ahead his constant companion.  What he looked at every day, holding in his as-yet unscarred hands the raw materials that would one day hold him above a mocking crowd and stain red beside the nail and the flesh as he pronounced an end to life being about traffic or work or anything else I can see.