From the end of 1986 through the fall of 1997 I was the church secretary at East Troy Bible Church in East Troy, Wisconsin. I put out a simple church newsletter using an electric typewriter and a copy machine. After our move from Mukwonago, WI to the Milwaukee, WI area I scanned all my early typed articles and saved them on an external hard drive, along with articles from my stint doing the newsletter at Spring Creek Church in Pewaukee, WI. Sadly for me, that hard drive suffered an early, (tragic!) death last year. Fortunately, I have hard copies of a good deal of my work and have been spending time transcribing them back into an electronic form. Thus, I found this account of God's grace to me that is as true and real today in 2014 as it was back in 1991. (The directional disability isn't any different, either!)

ISAIAH 41:10 AT WORK

Humanly speaking, there was good reason to fear. I had agreed to be one of the drivers for the recent ladies’ getaway to Indiana Amish country. To get there, you have to navigate through the clogged maze that is Chicago – and I have absolutely no sense of direction. I can get to the Grand Avenue Mall in Milwaukee but can’t get home without written instructions (unless I have someone else in the car whose brain has fully functioning directional circuits). I go into a store in the mall and when I come out I can’t remember if I’ve come from the right or from the left. When we moved to this area I was able to find my way quite nicely to either Brookfield Square or Southridge shopping center – but needed to go all the way home first if I wanted to go from one to the other.

The cause of this defect may be a faulty gene in my hereditary makeup. While riding in our car, my grandmother would often swear (meaning “stated emphatically,” – no actual swear words uttered...ever!) we were headed east while being blinded by the setting sun.

I also never drive in anything that could remotely be considered traffic. Mukwonago “traffic” is an oxymoron, and when it’s busy in Milwaukee I don’t go there. But, as Psalm 23:4 says, “I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.” As evil as I knew the Windy City’s snarled roads to be, God would have to be with me if I were to attempt anything as “foolhardy” (for me!) as this.

The Lord must have a delicious sense of humor, for He answered my plea for help getting through possible and highly probable Chicago traffic by putting me square in the middle of the very thing I feared: traffic, and loads of it! We left East Troy early on Friday to avoid the rush, but the rush outsmarted us. A trip that was scheduled to take four hours turned into eight (yes, we stopped twice, but still…).

Refusing to allow that to happen again, on Sunday our carload decided to depart for home earlier than the other two cars. There would be no familiar vehicle ahead of me to follow, but with three navigators, a road atlas and the Lord as our guide I figured we just might make it back to East Troy before the next week (though our goal was for that evening’s 6:30 service).

In my wildest imaginings I could not have conjured up the auto convention that occurred on the Interstate. Bumper to bumper and then a smash into my bumper (nothing serious but it definitely got our attention!). We decided to exit that monumental jam-up and turned off onto another highway. Through the city the speed limit was just 35mph, but at least the tires were rotating. However, after hitting potholes the size of our other car and wandering around in questionable neighborhoods, we decided that four small-town women belonged back on the I-system, no matter the congestion.

Well, there I was, white-knuckled once again, when one of my favorite Scriptures flashed through my vexed and befuddled mind: “Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee, yea I will help thee…” (Isaiah 41:10). He did do, as He always does, what He promised. “And it shall come to pass in the day that the Lord shall give thee rest…from thy fear” (Isaiah 14:3). Though still in the midst of more cars in one place than Henry Ford ever fantasized about, my fear was at rest. I relaxed. We returned. And we rejoiced!