Spirituality Column #731

November 17, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Don’t Miss the Bus

By Bob Walters

True story.  In the cold, pre-dawn January school-bus-route darkness along an Indiana country road, there appeared in the bus’s headlights a two-year-old child in pajamas …

Walking alone.

The unlit, two-lane road had a row of houses along one side, a stretch of field on the other, and beyond the field was a park with the child’s destination: a playground.  As her parents slept, the early-rising child opened an exterior door left unlatched when her teen brother headed to high school that morning. She made it down the driveway, across the road, and almost into the snow-scattered field. In frozen, 15-degree weather.

The child’s white-ish PJs served as the saving, noticeable beacon for the driver who conceded it was a God-thing not only that she saw the shadowy and barely visible image of the child, and but for a few seconds’ timing, didn’t run over her in the road.

The bus, loaded with junior high students, came to an immediate stop. Two sisters who lived nearby had just boarded the bus but didn’t recognize the child. At the driver’s direction, and with the bus’s red lights and stop arms flashing, the sisters retrieved the child, wrapped her in their jackets, and brought her onto the warm bus.

After several bus-to-HQ-to-police radio calls, the police took the child and knocked on doors until they found the parents, still asleep and completely unaware.

I know Denise the bus driver, and I heard her radio calls aboard the bus I drove that morning. The next year, routing changed and I had those two compassionate, life-saving sisters on my bus.  Denise and those girls saved that child’s and family’s life.

This presents something of a parable or a metaphor for how limited our view often is regarding the overall work of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God.  And I don’t mean simply: “Look how Jesus saved that child!”  No, it’s bigger than that.

For the rest of that child’s life and those of his parents, the story of how many different ways the school bus saved her that morning will be an intimate piece of their shared family narrative.  They will thank God, the bus driver, those sisters, and all involved that the child didn’t freeze to death, wasn’t struck on the road, didn’t encounter the wild foxes that populate that area, and wasn’t befallen by any other calamity.

The story for the child will be: “I was saved by a school bus.”  The brother escaped a lifetime of crushing guilt.  None in the family will ever look at a school bus the same way again, nor likely give much thought to everything else the school bus does.  Saving that child was huge, but only an incidental part of the bus’s overall purpose.

In the same way, many, many Christians look at Jesus Christ and thank Him for saving “me” – my forgiveness and cleansing from sin, for heaven and eternal life – without deeply, reverently, and in awe realizing and thanking Him for the totality of what His life, death, resurrection, and obedience to His mission mean for the entire cosmos. 

Jesus initiated God’s Kingdom on earth.  He restored our created and intimate relationship with God. He gifted us with the Holy Spirit to be among us in knowledge, hope, comfort, faith, and courage.  He taught us how to live for God’s glory, and that our loving, good God is a servant to us as we are to be to others. He is truth and authority.

We kind of miss the bus if we think Jesus’s only job was securing our salvation.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), in retirement, has driven a school bus since 2012.