I’m pressing on the upward way, new heights I’m gaining every day…*

Dear friend,

It was in late 1943 when my parents drove from south Texas to Southern California, where my father was promised an engineer’s job in the aircraft industry. The story, as it was told to me, began with the challenge of getting sufficient gas-rationing stamps--an element of World War II civilian life--to make the journey. That accomplished, they loaded up the car and headed west.

They shared the driving in order to make good time, and that was more easily accomplished because they yet had no children to care for on such a journey.

On a moonless Texas night, Daddy asleep in the passenger seat, they rolled down the road at high speed, Mother singing at the top of her voice, trying to stay awake. Then, out of nowhere, BOOM. The car crashed into a cow crossing the road. The cow was killed. The car was totaled. Both of my parents were uninjured, but were stunned, shaken, and scared. There was no Triple A. No cell phones. Nothing, just a dead cow, a dead car, and fear of the long, dark night ahead. Oh, and what was my Mother singing? An old Baptist favorite of the time: Higher Ground.

Still praying as I’m onward bound, “Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.”

In Matthew’s Gospel today, Jesus talks about continuity. His continuity in God, the continuity of the Old Law with his teachings, all one unbroken chain from before eternity to the current. This passage is an important one to remember when encountering the errant, though popular idea: That Jesus was a new part of God’s plan of salvation, implying that this new part was a break from the old. The Old Laws were still THE laws, said Jesus, noting that he was here to fulfill them, not abolish them.

***

Lord, lift me up and let me stand, by faith, on Heaven’s tableland…

Our faith comes from somewhere, usually people who played formational roles in our lives. Parents, grandparents, Sunday school teachers. Somehow we got the word of their faith and made it the word of our own. Perhaps someone caught the word from us. Or will. And on and on. An unbroken chain of “God with us.”

If it were not for my Mother’s initial conversations about Jesus with my brother and me, I don't know where else we may have encountered him. But she was the source of my initial, though immature, faith. Without those early seeds Mother planted within me, I may have wandered much further afield.

Today--September 18--is my mother’s birthday. If still living, she would be 103. Oh, and as for singing while driving, she continued that practice for years and years. But never, ever again, did she sing Higher Ground. She did not want God to think she was asking to go home any earlier than necessary.

A higher plane than I have found; Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.

Mtr Mary

*Higher Ground, 1902. Public domain.

Mtr Mary Trainor