The Muddy Road of Life
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| The yellow truck on the muddy road of life. |
On one muddy road I was heading to a Karen village called Pa
La Pi Ty. We had a 4 wheel drive pick up truck equipped with a winch on the
front in case we got stuck. I was driving but several of our Karen staff were
in our truck as well. It was the rainy season and the weather was living up to
expectations. It was pouring rain and had been for several days and the road
was a mess. Our trusty Toyota though, was handling the conditions well.
We climbed to the crest of a mountain then had to stop. On
the slope below us was the yellow pickup truck in the photo. It had no 4 wheel
drive and no winch and it was stuck. There were just a couple people in the
pickup and they had been doing what ever they could do to get their truck up
the hill but it wasn’t working. With the rain still pouring, nothing seemed
likely to change.
Our group got out of our truck and stood on our spot of high
ground to evaluate the scene. Option one, we might have been able to go around
them but there’d be a good chance we’d slide into them as we went by. We didn’t
want to do that as then we’d be responsible to fix any damage. Option 2, our
group could try to manually push them up the hill, but then we’d all be covered
in mud as well as drenched in the rain. Option 3, we were close enough, we
figured the cable from our winch could reach the yellow truck so maybe we could
pull them up the hill. The risk of course, is that if they were really stuck,
they would stay in place and the winch would pull our truck down the hill. But
as I mentioned, we were on pretty solid ground so we figured the winch was the
way to go.
Our worker (pictured in the white shirt) took the cable down
to the yellow truck and they hooked up. The winch worked its magic and sure enough
we were able to pull the yellow truck up the hill and send it on its way. We
wound up our cable and got ready to continue our trip as well.
As we wound up our cable and reloaded our truck, the guys
were getting a good chuckle. It seems the two men in the yellow truck were
non-Christian Hmong that apparently, knew very little of the Christian faith. I
hadn’t personally gone down to the yellow truck, but they had seen me, this
tall white guy, up at our truck. In the course of hooking up our winch cable,
our worker must have mentioned we were Christians on a trip to Pa La Pi Ty. To
the Hmong, I was out of the ordinary and Christians were a mystery so they
asked our worker if I was Jesus!
Wow! For our workers who knew me well, they knew for sure I
was not Jesus. But it was a sobering reminder for me that where ever we went
and what ever we did, it represented Jesus. Whether we helped a stranded car or
passed them by splashing them with mud might be giving someone their first impression
of Jesus and the Christian faith. I was very grateful we chose to help that day
and tried hard to remember from then on that whatever we did along the muddy
road of life, we were being watched and needed to live a life “worthy of our
calling” (Ephesians 4:1).
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