Kingsview

Keeping Going Through Mud

Michael A. King

On the New Mexico map the road has a route number and looks official enough, though marked as having 25 miles of gravel surface. Going that way will save 60 miles. When I get to the gravel part, it looks fine. I want to save 60 miles. 

Nearly halfway. No big deal. Then aftermath of thunderstorms. Then snow. Colder and colder as the road climbs. Slick road. Slicker. Now driver door instead of front end is facing front. Road becomes mud five inches down. Either move about two miles an hour or sideways or visit the ditch. But go too slow and stall. Still 15 miles to go. Car whines back and forth in ruts, throwing mud, slipping, veering. My foot shakes from tension and holding it barely on the gas pedal. I feel I may be in trouble. 

I want to panic. But I’m up in the mountains. No one nearby. And if someone does turn up, it may not be a good someone. I am in a bad spot.

A snatch of a verse comes into my head. I’m not sure from where. I think from a psalm but I can’t say that at the moment chapter and verse seem essential. And I’m not sure what version I’m remembering in, but I decide God may not care. This is what I hear: “The Lord preserves your going out and your coming in.” The phrase takes over my entire mind. I decide I have no choice but to trust the words and, unless I just can’t, to keep going even at inches an hour. 

>I become nothing but a piece of scared meat hunched over a steering wheel guided by a mind with nothing in it but “Keep going” and “The Lord preserves your going out and your coming in.” On and on and on. “Keep going. The Lord preserves your going out and your coming in. Keep going. The Lord preserves your going out and your coming in.”

Two and a half hours later, good road.

Has the Lord preserved my going out and my coming in? Unclear, as these things so often are. In the most obvious sense, no. Not the Lord but I preserved my going out and my coming in. Terrified as I was, still I was who chose the speed and the angle of the wheel and which ruts to try to stay in.

Probably any given day around the world, people don’t make it through such circumstances. Did God then fail to preserve their goings out and their comings in? I hate to think so. I’ve never been a fan of saying well we know this miracle is God’s preservation because then how do we not also insist that tragedy is God’s lack of preservation? 

Still I suspect my experience says something about God. I suspect it illustrates that when in terror we leap for a primal lifeline, it is more there for us than if we don’t. I truly was so frightened that I could barely think straight, my body so shaken I could barely steer. If I had not clung to my “The Lord preserves” lifeline, maybe I’d have limped into town alive anyway. And maybe not.

This I’d guess is often, if we’re honest, the way it really is with faith. We don’t know for sure how God is present—or not—at the other end of the line. We only know that we got here clinging to the line. Better to have clung and lost, I suspect—and surely better to have clung and won!—than never to have clung at all. 

My family can testify that I don’t test God any more by driving on dirt roads through mud. But if I ever find myself similarly fearing for my very life, I will be quick to cling once more to the Lord who preserves “thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and for evermore,” as I now know Psalm 121 (ASV) does put it.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC; editor, DreamSeeker Magazine; and a pastor and speaker.