Commentary: Ripples on the water

I remember speaking for worship at a church some time ago. I needed to illustrate the impact of a certain life-altering phone call I had received in my history. So I delivered the line, “And then the phone rang,” followed by a dramatic pause. As soon as I paused, I noticed several people looking at each other in shock and then laughing.

I continued with my presentation, but in the back of my mind there was this frantic search for what I had said so outlandish for which I needed to “cover” with some kind of retraction. I could think of nothing. So I concluded my talk with this “cloud” hanging over my delivery.

As I greeted the worshippers leaving the sanctuary, a woman came to me, rather apologetically, and asked, “Do you know what we were laughing about this morning?” I said I didn’t. So she explained, “A split second after you said, ‘And then the phone rang,’ the phone in the open office beside the sanctuary began to ring!”

We had a good chuckle and I sighed in relief that I hadn’t committed some gargantuan blunder.

For several yeaers I occasionally produced multi-image shows for my church and the ministerial association of my home town. For Easter one year, I produced “A Promise in Fowler Woods” with a resurrection theme. I recorded the narration in the back of the woods on my property to capture the outdoor ambient sound. There was a voice-over, “A bird calls and the day begins in Fowler Woods.” Those were the days of quarter-inch audio tape, so my plan was to get out the splicing block and splicing tape and splice a pre-recorded bird call into the space after those words.

In preparation for the edit I listened to those words in my recorded voice-over. To my disbelief I discovered, perfectly timed at a perfect sound level, the beautiful call of some bird in my woods on Rome South Road. I hadn’t put it there; I didn’t even remember a bird call in my recording session.

Ah, yes!

I know I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again, “I’ve never seen the waters parted like Moses did, but I’ve sure seen plenty of ripples on the water.”

When I was a young guy, full of vinegar, I could talk myself out of a God who really knows me and pays attention to me. I can’t do that anymore. God is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God who is not above a sense of humor, a God who occasionally just might enjoy planting a phone ring or a bird call.

Glad we could get together.