Road Trip: Part 8

Wednesday evening participated in a Bible study on Matthew 6:25 thru 7:5. About a dozen were there. The Matthew 6 passage is yet another support for the simple life. If we will seek the kingdom of God first, then we will discover that many of the materials things that we thought we needed are unnecessary. The second passage rests on the premise that we are typically far more sensitive to things that we think have been done to us than on things that we have done to other people. We need to clean our own mess before we can clean anyone else's. Thursday was a long day of driving, made worse by the reality of illness. Drove approximately 575 miles ( 927 kilometers) from northeast Arkansas to Columbus, Ohio. As with at least half of the other days of this trip, it rained. The Mississippi River was in brownish flood and all the fields in that area were underwater. I crossed into Tennessee, Kentucky, and later Ohio. About ten or twelve miles south of Cincinati, while still in Kentucky I stopped at a sit down restaurant and tried to order a "hot brown", a type of sandwich native to the city. Of five waitresses, only one had heard of it. I guess it is only within city limits. As with most of my driving the few cities are like densely populated islands in vast seas of farm and grazing land. For example there is virtually nothing but hamlets between the major cities of Cincinatti and Columbus. Friday continued my trek into northern Ohio and east into western Pennsylvania. It began to snow. After three weeks of spring like weather I was returning to the iron grip of winter. Traveled all day through Pennsylvania, finally reached Scranton, and my penultimate destination. My friends Rob and Shalom and their two energetic children greeted me. Several years had passed and i was meeting their youngest child, a daughter two and a half, for the first time. She made me some Filipino food. I was exhausted, still sick, and went to bed early. We had a little Bible study that night with several neighbors. Rob has recently become the pastor of a small church in the area.