Riding in the Car, I Mean, Sitting on the Ground with Jesus by Wil Triggs
“I’m sorry about my speedometer,” Mary, the driver said. The gauge in her car bounced back and forth from zero to 120, making a sound like an overly caffeinated metronome trying to make sure I stayed in tempo with the “Flight of the Bumblebee.”
“It usually works fine,” she explained, “until we hit 90, and then it just starts to freak out like this. It needs fixing.”
Great, I thought. We’re going to get killed in a car accident.
Mary was weaving from lane to lane and even onto the median, trying to make up for lost time. We were moving so fast that the other cars traveling at a normal speed looked like they were parked. I imagined coverage of the tragic accident in the local news.
Who will break the news to my parents? They won’t believe it. Mom and Dad thought I was at an evening service at a church I never went to except for these Saturday music gigs, just a half mile from our home.
But when I got to the church that late afternoon, I discovered they had rented a bus for the orchestra and choir to go to San Diego for a special service in Balboa Park. The bus was running late. “Sorry,” explained the concert master, who was a first chair violinist in the high-school orchestra. “I thought San Diego was next weekend,” he shrugged. People started to climb onto the bus.
There were no cellphones. I couldn’t call and explain to my parents.
One problem. There were too many people to fit on the bus. The driver wouldn’t drive an over-filled bus. He could be fired. There were words between him and the organizers, but he wasn’t going to budge.
After watching the debate, Mary offered to drive her car. So, some of us orchestra members crammed ourselves and our instruments into her sedan. But the delay had thrown us off schedule, and we needed to get to the service on time. She turned the car’s air conditioning on high. We wound our way from the church to the freeway and headed south toward San Diego.
That’s when the tapping began. It was loud and wouldn’t stop unless she decelerated to something closer to the speed limit.
This wasn’t even my church, not even my kind of church exactly.
I was at my high school at the end of the term when a friend of a friend asked me, “Can you play the Hallelujah Chorus?”
“Sure,” I said. The trumpet solo part was fun to play.
“Would you come and play at our Saturday night service? We need a trumpet player. One who can do the Hallelujah Chorus.”
“Okay, yeah,” I said. “I’ll come.”
Thus began my summer at what turned out to be a series of Pentecostal healing services on Saturday nights. Most weeks we played at the church near my home. We travelled into Los Angeles several times and now this one trip to San Diego where we soared by the other vehicles going at the normal traffic flow rate, all to the tap, tap, tap of the overtaxed speedometer.
Where was the California Highway Patrol? It was only a matter of time before one of them pulled up behind us, siren screeching and lights blazing. “What kind of Christian witness would that be?” my frightened self asked. But it never happened.
We arrived at the Balboa Park venue in half the normal time. No car accident. No speeding citation.
It turned out that there were two different “Hallelujahs” that we played—Handel’s and the praise chorus one. We played Handel at the beginning and end of each service, but we also did the praise song “Hallelujah” multiple times over the course of the night. Musically, it was quite a workout. I wasn’t used to playing without notation, and except for Handel, most of what we played was improv, something they called “playing in the Spirit.” Sometimes we passed hymnals around and people would call out numbers for us to turn to and play. The congregation/audience in the theater-style seats either found the numbers in the hymnal or already knew the words because they were all singing.
I did my best to concentrate on the various musical pieces, and except for the sermon and testimony time, we played through the whole service. This was outside my comfort zone. As we played, people would line up to come forward for prayer. Non-stop music, like they couldn’t have silence in the service, not even during the prayers.
People, in lines that stretched down the aisles, sang, prayed, cried and waited for their turn to be prayed for, to be healed. I tried not to look at them in line. It seemed somehow private, whatever reason they had for standing there, and I wasn’t sure what I thought of the whole thing. This was not me. I was Baptist or Friends—something not that. But there I was—just there to play the trumpet after all.
And then people would wait to give testimony to the healing power of Jesus. The audience laughed, clapped, burst into spontaneous song, which was always our cue to start playing whatever they happened to be singing. I honestly don’t know how we did it. Somehow it all worked out.
On the way home, I traded spaces with another friend and rode safely home on the bus.
This pandemic summer, I’ve been thinking about that summer. The world right now feels like one long over-the-speed-limit ride to San Diego in a car that needs fixing. The danger of crashing all around, anger at injustice, growing global persecution of Christians, corruption, an election coming in the fall, daily reports on infections and deaths even on local news. It goes on and on. There are so many places to get off course. And people are lining up in their own ways to find some kind of healing, connection, hope, relief. Those lines of people came to mind early in the pandemic, when Lorraine and I were waiting in line at the grocery store with what seemed like half the town, everyone hungry and wanting to protect themselves from sickness.
It reminds me, too, of the crushing persistent crowds who came to Jesus seeking healing, curious to listen to his teaching and see what he had to say and be part of the wonders he might do in their midst.
As we move into today, the weekend, next week, the rest of 2020, let’s pray for revival—not just for the lost, though certainly that, but also in us. Many are tired and weary.
As the gospel writer observed in Mark 8:1-9:
In those days, when again a great crowd had gathered, and they had nothing to eat, he called his disciples to him and said to them, “I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And if I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way. And some of them have come from far away.” And his disciples answered him, “How can one feed these people with bread here in this desolate place?” And he asked them, “How many loaves do you have?” They said, “Seven.” And he directed the crowd to sit down on the ground. And he took the seven loaves, and having given thanks, he broke them and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and they set them before the crowd. And they had a few small fish. And having blessed them, he said that these also should be set before them. And they ate and were satisfied. And they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. And there were about four thousand people. And he sent them away.
As troubled as the world is, there is enough of Jesus and his abundant grace to go around. With baskets left over. More than enough for us all.
I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
no sudden rending of the veil of clay,
no angel visitant, no opening skies;
but take the dimness of my soul away.
