But we will have to run aground on some island. (Acts 27:26)
It’s hard to believe, but next January will mark the 30th anniversary of my moving to the Chicago area. I’m not sure how I’ll commemorate the occasion, but it’s already bringing back memories of things I noticed when I moved to Evanston in 1992, like how expensive macaroni & cheese was compared to my former local grocery store and how I heard a lot more sirens than I did in Indianola, Iowa.
Navigating the train system, of course, was also new. I was, not surprisingly, a novice at riding mass transit. Regular riders who go north on the CTA Red Line know that the last stop is Howard Street and if you want to keep going north to Evanston, you have to get off at Howard and get on a Purple Line train. On one of my early train-riding days, I got off at Howard and saw there was another train waiting so I just got on that one without paying attention to little things like what color that line was and where it was headed. The train lurched forward and I settled in until I noticed that the scenery was, well, not Evanston. Not long after that, the announcement came through, “Next stop, Skokie.” Skokie? What is Skokie?
My heart sank as I realized I had gotten on the Yellow Line, not the Purple Line. The Yellow Line is also called the Skokie Swift and there’s just one stop. It takes you to a depot in the suburb of Skokie so there’s no getting off at a stop and backtracking. This was many years before cell phones, of course, so I frantically searched the map on the train and wondered how I was going to make it home from this new land called Skokie. Thankfully, the station ended up being on a street that I was familiar with so I walked the three miles to my apartment in Evanston and was introduced to Skokie along the way.
Some readers of the Bible may be familiar with some of the stories in the book of Acts, especially the story of Pentecost in chapter 2 or Saul’s conversion in chapter 9. But Acts is a long book–28 chapters– with some pretty wild stories near the end. I was reading one of them in chapter 27 a few weeks ago. The three section headings of this chapter some it up: “Paul Sails for Rome,” “The Storm at Sea,” and “The Shipwreck.” The chapter is filled with incidents where sailors and passengers on various boats were intending to go to some place, but the weather took them somewhere else, much to their chagrin. What struck me about one of these instances was that at some point, the sailors realized that fighting the wind was useless so they just gave in to where the wind was going to take them. There was deep fear and anxiety among the passengers and Paul did his best to comfort them and lessen their fears: “So keep up your courage, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told. But we will have to run aground on some island.”
“Some island” was not part of their itinerary. “Some island” was not on their list of places to visit. But they trusted in the midst of the swirling winds, crashing waves, and high anxiety that “some island” is where they were supposed to go.
I’m a little jealous of that trust. Instead, my version of following Jesus means too often that it’s my expectation that Jesus follow me and follow my itinerary. I’m more of the fight-the-winds kind of Christian than I am let-the-winds-carry-me-and-arrive-on-some-island kind of Christian. That’s often a fruitless exercise.
My prayer–and maybe you can relate to this, as well–is that every day, I can hand over to Jesus my personal GPS and my map and trust instead that he will lead me to where I’m supposed to go. Even if it’s on some island. Even if it’s to Skokie.