Peril

 You cry for help when your life’s in peril, not when you can’t quite reach your umbrella drink from a sitting position. It would be nice to have a permanent butler there in the snap of a finger as soon as you ring a tiny bell, but God isn’t a butler, and to think Him such demeans His nature, who He is, and what man’s relationship toward Him ought to be.

For that matter, He isn’t a magic genie, a fortune teller, a mystic, or Santa Clause. His entire reason for being isn’t to bless you, and your obedience isn’t optional; it is mandatory.

We’ve been spoon-fed the nonsense about being tiny gods for so long that some have even taken to believing it. No, they’re not impudent enough to use the big G, but what’s the harm in a little g? The whole dynamic falls apart when you substitute the words creation and Creator for God and god. It’s not just a didactic difference. It isn’t something we can sweep under the rug with a shoulder shrug and an eye roll.

The devil lied, but Eve went apple-picking anyway. You are not like God. Except for knowing the difference between good and evil, that’s where your similitude with God ends. Being made in the image of someone doesn’t make you a tiny version of that someone with the same inherent powers and abilities, just in miniature form.

When people see my eldest daughter and my wife together, there’s always the comparison since they look so similar. It’s a smaller version of you always ends up being said at some point, but she’s not. She is independent, autonomous, self-governing, and separate. The same goes for the my body, my choice crowd. It’s not, though. There is an independent, sovereign human residing inside of you. It’s not just your body, it’s their body too, and you’re making a choice to murder it because it’s inconvenient to your five-year plan.

I get that we have excuses at the ready for every unscriptural thing we do. It would be fun to watch if it wasn’t so heartbreaking. While most people don’t bother to read their Bibles regularly, let them try to find a justification for something they’re doing, and they become scripture sleuths and theological scholars overnight. They’ll go into Greek, then Latin, then translate the Latin into the Greek, then into King James English, just to try to make their point. If they’d put that much effort into forming a relationship with God and growing in their faith, they wouldn’t need to be pretzel-twisting the Scriptures for an excuse.  

In order to have a rightful expectation of God’s help, we must first define what the word trouble means. That way, people won’t be accusing God of not showing up every other minute even though He promised He would be a present help in times of trouble. I couldn’t find my car keys, and I said Lord help, and He didn’t. I kept looking for my car keys for another five minutes until I realized they were in my pants pocket. Was that really trouble, or was it more you being scatterbrained and not taking a second to inhale, exhale, then think the situation through logically?

To say that we have become like the boy who cried wolf, but instead, we cry for help would be a mischaracterization of the boy. We’re like the boy who cried wolf on speed with a half dozen Red Bull chasers under our belt.

The issues most people are crying for help with can readily be solved with a bit of common sense and some elbow grease. You’re not in trouble. You may be in an uncomfortable situation, but if you were in trouble and cried out to God, He would be there to help.

I’ve only ever been in trouble once. Some years ago, I was driving from Bucharest to Botosani, Romania, in the milkiest fog you’ve ever seen. If ever there was a setting for a horror movie, that was it. I wasn’t going slow enough; truth be told, I probably shouldn’t have been driving in that soup at all, but I wanted to get home, and parking on the side of the road until morning wasn’t that appealing.

The road curved left, I didn’t, and I saw the highway beam dividers the instant before impact. It’s not as though I was driving a sturdy car. It was a puke green two-door Ford Escort hatchback. It was as pretty as it was tough.

I knew what would happen before it did, and all I had time for was an ‘Oh, God’ before the sound of metal on metal and the force of the impact made everything go dark. I don’t know if I passed out; if I did, it was only seconds, but when I opened my eyes, a beam was sticking through the windshield and out the back hatch, and that was just the start of it.

I made to get out of the car, and surprisingly, the door opened after a bit of prodding. I walked around it to get my bearings and saw two more beams sticking out of the engine block, with quite a few others littering the highway. I looked down the edge of the beam that had gone through the windshield, and it had missed the driver’s side headrest by a few inches at most.

I sat on the curb and fished in my pockets for my cell phone, and as I did, cars began to pull over with drivers and passengers rushing to my ruined Escort, feverishly pulling on the doors. When I asked one of the closest men what they were doing, he looked at me as though I was slow-witted and said, “we’re trying to get the victims out.”

“What victims?” I asked.

“The bodies, boy, the bodies. No one could have survived this.”

I stood up, brushed some dirt off my pants, then tried to tell the man that there were no victims, there were no bodies, and I’d just called the police to come and file a report.

It was only then that I realized I didn’t have a scratch on me: no bloody nose, scraped knees, or bruises of any kind.

The police came, they wrote out a report, called a tow truck, and drove me to the train station so I could catch a train home. A few weeks later, when they sent their final determination, the police informed me I had gone through twenty-four beams before the car finally stopped.

Psalm 50:15, “Call Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.”

He did, and I did, just like He said I would because when you see the hand of God deliver you from certain death, there’s nothing else you can do but glorify Him.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.