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I have had numerous unusual and unexpected experiences in the dark. (Yeah, I have).
You see, five or six days a week around 4am, I grab my cell phone, fill up my metal tumbler with water, step out the door which opens into my garage, install the tumbler on my bike, open the garage door, and go out into the night.
A young guy in a front yard, who when I passed him stepped behind a palm tree. A woman with a little pooch standing in a landscaped area of a bank, and singing the most eerie melody I’d ever heard in my life on this planet. A young man limping along the side of the road with a cane; just as I was completing my ride, and nearing my home. Trading my bike for my car, I drove up to where I’d seen him, offered him a ride, and drove him the remaining two miles to his home. He told me he’d just been released from the county jail, and had already walked about eight miles. An incident in which a woman seemed to be involuntarily dragged into a truck that had been stopped at a redlight. A twenty something year old man walking along a sidewalk who disappeared in the time it took for me to look left and then right at an intersection. A kitten sitting on the three foot base of a light pole, a mini-Doberman tied to a telephone pole; (both of which I retrieved and took home with me).
Pt. 2
As I prepared to go out in the wee hours this morning, the first day of the year, stuffed my cell phone in my pocket, fitted my metal tumbler on my bike, and opened the garage door, I saw him. (At least, I suppose it was a ‘him’).
A tall dark figure with long bushy hair. I suppose he was thirty feet away, and coming out of a neighbor’s yard. It is important to understand that I live on a cul-de-sac, the neighbor’s house is at the very end of the street, and their backyard borders the backyard of another family whose front yard borders a two lane highway about a hundred feet from my house. While I am in the middle of a large subdivision, and mostly well away from everything, anybody who “takes a notion” can walk off the highway, through a couple of yards, and arrive on my cul-de-sac. Apparently, this fellow had done just that.
When the phantom saw my bicycle headlight, he took a left, and began to walk towards another neighbor’s yard. As you might well imagine, when I saw this unknown guy with unknown intentions somewhere he should not have been, my early morning pursuits changed dramatically. I wheeled my bike around, walked it back into my garage, and tapped the garage door opener, (well, garage door closer). While I looked out my front window several times in the next few minutes, I never saw him again.
Odd, I thought. The first day of the year, and the first unusual nightly experience of the year; and one which admittedly sent chills up my spine.
And in retrospect, it occurred to me that as a believer, I can take comfort in the promises that,
“God is faithful, and He will not allow you to be tempted above that which you are able, but will, with the temptation also provide you a way to escape.”
(and)
“But I am persuaded that neither life, nor death, not angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.”
We have entered a new year, a year chuck full of 365 unwritten, blank pages. It is comforting to know that the great “I AM” has preceded us there, and can be depended upon to clear the unknown pathway before us.
by William McDonald, PhD
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