Surrounded by Favor

Surrounded by God’s Favor

Psalms 5:12

It was Sunday evening, July 9, 2017. It had been a lovely day for a relaxing ride on the motorcycle along the Delaware River through Point Pleasant. Now it was time to kick back for the evening. Except that it was not to be. The phone rang. It was one of my coworkers from Alderfer. And he had a small problem. His car wouldn’t start and he is looking for a way to jump it.

“I’ll be there in 20 minutes,” I told him and set off to find my jumper cables and embark on the short drive to Lansdale. When I arrived, they were both on their phones, searching the internet for any information as to why the car would not start. And it wouldn’t! Even with the jumper cables hooked up and the battery obviously having enough power, nothing would happen when the key was turned on.

So here we were, with a dead car that needed to be moved and Nate figuring that he would need to quit his job and work for the beer distributer down the street since he had no car to drive to work. I stood there, staring at the dead engine wondering how in the world this situation in any way showed that I was “surrounded by God’s favor”. But it was in the midst of pondering those dismal thoughts that the idea hit me that at least I could lend them my car for the next week while they got this mess figured out. Karen was heading to Florida for a week and her car would be sitting in the garage, unused. And then another thought came into my mind. Maybe this is an appropriate time to call Keith, my good friend from church. So, I dialed his number.

Keith told me that he had finished all the things that he was doing for the evening and had just sat down on the patio to rest. But sure, he would be glad to help. And he happened to have a car trailer. He would hook it up and be there in 20 minutes. He would also bring along the block and tackle to pull the dead car onto the trailer.

When I broke the news and the plan to Nate and McKenna, she told me that she had been sitting there in the car thinking that she was about to have a heart attack! The stress was intense inside her chest. But suddenly now, from out of despair, there appeared to be hope. And indeed, the trailer was perfect. The block and tackle, which had served me so well in replacing the broken glass at the top of a library elevator tower, once again came to the rescue as we three strong men heaved on the rope and McKenna operated the steering and the brakes to get the clunker safely aboard the trailer.

They had found a garage not too far away where we could drop the car off, hoping that the owner would take pity on the poor vehicle and get it going the next day. Nate traveled along with Keith and McKenna jumped into the car with me. And it soon became apparent that the surrounding favor of the Lord was continuing during that short drive. I brought up the subject of the “Patterns of Evidence” that my friend Tim Mahoning had made. I knew that McKenna had watched it. She told me that they had just happened upon this movie and had watched it on a whim. She had really resonated with the way Tim had shown a timeline in that movie that aligned Egyptian and Hebrew history. The visualization of how these histories could align was so compelling that she ended up watching it multiple times.

Ultimately, she claimed that it was this movie that pushed her over the edge into accepting Christianity. She had been deeply immersed in the occult from age 13. She had dabbled very deeply into the dark sides of Egyptology, even claiming to have personally met with the ancient Egyptian deities. But the Lord had opened her eyes to Christianity through her relationship with Nate. However she was unable to embrace it because, in her skeptical mind, she could not believe in the truth of the Bible if its historical record of the Israelites in Egypt did not align with the accepted Egyptian timeline. But here was this movie, suddenly correcting that timeline to give an astute recalculation that showed that, indeed, the history of the Bible could be correct. And if that history was true, then Christ’s calling upon her heart could also be true. So, with the movie, having broken down that last dividing wall between her and her Savior, she moved from the world of spiritual darkness into spiritual light.

The fact that a dark, despairing car problem could be turned into such a wonderful opportunity for Keith and me to share Christian kindness and to provide me with the opportunity to find such a brilliant validation of my friend’s movie was not lost on me. Tim had struggled for 13 years to put that movie together. I called him and gave him MeKenna’s name. They plan to have some interesting discussions together in the future. And Keith, for his part said, “I love doing these little deeds of kindness!” And Nate and McKenna, isolated here in an unfamiliar town, away from friends and support structure, were given a real-life example of being surrounded by God’s favor!