From The Manse Window
From the manse window
IHAD just spent a lovely weekend at our flat in Anstruther, which included two fish suppers and no cooking!
Having checked everything and locked up, I was driving home to Dundee, already looking forward to a wedding that afternoon. Fortunately, I had allowed myself plenty of time, given how things turned out.
Over the familiar miles through St Andrews, Guardbridge and Leuchars and onward towards the Tay Road Bridge, the car could almost drive itself.
It was halfway over the bridge that the question shot into my mind and wouldn’t go away: had I switched the oven off?
The question wouldn’t go away or even rest, but nagged all the away back to the manse. On arriving I phoned Sandy, who held a key for our flat, but without success.
I gathered my things together for the imminent wedding, had lunch and almost convinced myself that I was worrying about nothing, but to no avail.
I knew in my heart what that decision would be. If I left now, there would be plenty of time to travel the 25 miles to Anstruther, check the oven and be back well before the wedding.
I was on my own without anybody to talk some sense into me and so you’ll know what happened next. The clincher was, somehow, that it was a gas oven and what if it went out?
And so back I drove, all the while castigating myself for my incurable stupidity. Í don’t think I have been stuck behind so many tractors before!
I reached Anstruther and headed straight for the oven, which, as expected, was off.
With no time for a coffee, I turned around to head back to Dundee, but not before going back to check first the oven and then that I had locked the doors. Sad, isn’t it?
Jesus had some surprisingly harsh things to say to those who felt they had to go back to do something before following him. Is there anything more important, we can almost hear him asking, than following me?
I like to think that he was inspired by the most dramatic instance of looking back in the whole Bible and, perhaps, anywhere.
“Run for your lives!” God commands Lot and his wife as they escape from Sodom. “Don’t look back and don’t stop in the valley. Run to the hills!”
“That’s too far,” Lot complained. “Let us go to that village nearby!”
They safely reached the village, but Lot’s wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt.
Far from being primitive, that image of a pillar of salt cries out far more eloquently than mere words. It is meant to shock on many levels far beyond the awful destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Lot and his wife had escaped with their lives and God’s strict warning not to look back, but Lot’s wife couldn’t resist the very human temptation.
She is a lasting memorial to backward-looking faith, stuck in the past and going nowhere.
“Lean on the future,” Sydney Carter, the composer and writer, urges. “For there, if anywhere, the miracle must happen.”
Be warned, be encouraged, look forward in faith!