Coco Calling No.198 - My Owner and his Emergency Stops

My owner works as a school dinner man, and part of his role is to transport meals between the school where they are cooked and a smaller school further out in the countryside. It’s a ten-mile journey between the two and the route involves driving along some fairly narrow country lanes. He has to have his wits about him because every so often, he’s forced to make an emergency stop! Once it was a speeding car coming in the opposite direction. On another occasion, it was a young rabbit full of wide-eyed innocence. Another time it was a pheasant working out the meaning of life while standing in the road around a completely blind bend. And most recently, the culprits were a family of sparrows enjoying a dust-bath in a pothole.

Whether it’s by luck or good fortune, he’s normally been able to avoid any collisions. But the food he’s transporting isn’t always so fortunate. It’s stashed in large boxes on the back seat of his car, and an emergency stop means that they can sometimes become airborne. And if he’s really unlucky, something can fly out and flip over. And so over the years, my owner’s had to contend with gravy slicks and fruit cocktail puddles swilling around on the back seats of his car.

Some humans would become very upset by this but my owner has learnt to take it all in his stride. His philosophy is “better a spillage than a casualty or crash.” It’s all too easy for us to grumble when things go wrong or to complain about our bad luck. But actually, the secret to contentment is always to turn things around and to count our blessings. Things don’t always turn out as we’d like in life. Many things are sent to try us. And when that happens, we need to see everything in a wider perspective. My owner’s recently come out of hospital after having had surgery for cancer. It would be all too easy for him to say “Why me?” or for him to feel down about things. But instead he’s flipped the situation on its head. His cancer has been caught early. He lives in a country with a wonderful NHS. And he’s now recuperating at home with a loving and caring wife looking after him. So in fact, compared to a great many humans around the world, you could say he’s very blessed.

There will be many humans around the world right now who are terminally ill or going through all kinds of suffering and hardship. But even for them, there will always be a light at the end of the tunnel. And that light is Jesus and eternity in Heaven. Corrie ten Boon discovered this during her ordeal in a German concentration camp. She later wrote:

“You can never learn that Christ is all you need until Christ is all you have.” (Corrie ten Boon: 1892-1983: Dutch Christian writer, broadcaster, and survivor of a Nazi concentration camp).

And she learnt that none of life’s experiences, however wretched, are ever wasted…

“Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives, is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.” (Corrie ten Boon).

So, my feathery message for you today is to always count your blessings! Because even when Life becomes frustrating or unbearable, Jesus will be there for every single one of us waiting for us to call out His name…

“Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.”

(John 6: 35)