So I went to lunch with Daniel Langston and Jonathan Redic the other day.  Daniel was home on two week leave from the Coast Guard Academy, and I was glad he had a moment or two to spare for me.  The three of us went to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet - Daniel is a former varsity football player, and Jonathan is a growing boy (so am I) - so I wanted to take the guys to a place with plenty of groceries.  At the end of lunch, the waitress brought us the bill and three fortune cookies.  Fortune cookies are not traditional Chinese fare, as you may know, but are as American as burritos - so is the ritual of reading the wise, funny, or oddly pertinent things your fortunes say to those at your table.

That day our fortunes were not wise, funny, or oddly pertinent - they were ominous.  All three promised doom.  Daniel's said something like "Preparedness averts tragedy."  Jonathan's fortune said "Stop, drop, and roll" (or maybe it just said "DUCK!!!!!!!).  Mine said "Something ominous lies in your path ahead."  If just one of us had cracked open a foreboding mini-missive we could have laughed it off, but three of us is the hat-trick - the hat-trick of doom.

I worried about this all day.  This unspecified "ominous" thing that "lies in my path ahead" dominated my thoughts, preventing sleep until well past my 10pm bed time.  I was alone in the house for the weekend - except for my cat, and the Pamplin's dog, which I was dog-sitting, and which kept barking at ghosts.  My family was scattered across the heat-wave blanketed, and hurricane pounded South and West (well, one daughter was in the shark-infested waters of Florida's Atlantic coast) - so I had much upon which my fears could fixate.  Also, I was raised by women who expected the worst and were rarely disappointed (when someone asked my grandmother, "Where's your faith, Pauline," she would reply, "Show me the verse that says the Soyuz Space Station won't fall on my house, and I'll believe it," - there is much wisdom in that).

Then it began to storm.  I'm not afraid of thunderstorms, but the thunder this time didn't sound right.  The thunder didn't clap, it kind of boomed and rolled like the atomic bombs going off at the end of Doctor Strangelove - I even think I heard the faint, plaintive voice of Vera Lynn singing "I'll Be Seeing You..." Then, at 2:15 am the phone rang.  "Is this Mr. Bryson?" a professional - sounding voice asked...

Boom.

"This is Janey with Simplex-Grinnell, and you have a false-alarm going off at Church.  We need you to go down and handle it."  I knew what this meant - it meant getting up, getting dressed, getting out in the storm, driving to the building, finding it filled with flashing lights, the steady blaring of one alarm, and the piercing beep of a second alarm (which is not unlike listening to my eldest daughter's iPod), calling in the false alarm to 911, waiting half an hour on a service call, then working over the phone for about an hour with the service guy to get the blaring to stop.  I was so relieved.

If I was going to get a call at 2:15 that morning - that was the call I wanted to get.

If that was the ominous thing lying in my path, then I was ready for it.

Whew!

Sometimes, though, the phone call in the wee hours is not so easily handled.  We know that, and we also know that my Grandma Pauline was right - God does not promise otherwise.  He never says "you will not face fires, floods, and storms."  He says, "When you face them I will be there," (Isaiah 43.2).  He promises something else in that verse.   He promises that we will not be over whelmed.  In this passage (Isaiah 43.1-7) He promises that we belong to Him, that He will bring us home, thus there is no logical reason to be crippled by fear.

The thing about most fortunes found in cookies is that they are so general they are generally true.  This is certainly the case with my fortune cookie of doom - there is always something ominous lying in the path ahead.  What we know is this- if we belong to God, that "ominous" thing will not be more than we can handle, and it will not persist - at some point the path will end, at some point we will be home.