Starting my day with a traffic court appearance was an
eye-opener, to say the least.
I hadn't really known what to expect when a recent citation
after a morning fender bender demanded my presence at court. I got there early,
as I didn't want to start things off poorly with the judge by showing up late.
I needn't have worried; the judge was nowhere to be seen. Or perhaps it's
standard procedure for His Honor not to show until 40 minutes after the slated
hour. Even after he had entered the courtroom, procedural business and various
matters took up his attention for quite some time. In fact, it wasn't until we
had been sitting before him for two full hours that he was finally ready to
tackle the traffic citations awaiting his attention.
He pointed to a man sitting in the front row of chairs and
asked his name. Learning that his last name was Stevens, he then directed any
of us whose last name began with a letter between “S” and “Z” to line up along
the side wall in alphabetical order and await his attention.
It turned out to be an instruction too difficult for us to
handle. Three men apparently desperate to get out of the place arose and moved
to get in line, making no effort to communicate with each other to follow the
judge's instructions. One by one he called them forward, only to find that none
of them had last names that fell in the appropriate range. He ranted and raved
and berated the men for not following his instructions, repeating them more
loudly with each offender. One by one, red-faced and humiliated, they shuffled
back to their seats to try again later.
Exasperated himself, the judge next asked for those whose
last names began with A through L to line up and arrange themselves in the
proper order. Finding myself in that category, I eagerly jumped up and moved to
do so. The rest of the group sat in stunned silence; only one other man got up
along with me. Learning that his last name began with a “C”, I stepped in front
of him and awaited the judge's invitation to step to the platform.
What struck me as most unusual about the strange morning was
the judge's method of calling us forward. Surely it would have been much easier
to just call us by name as he worked through the stack of folders before him.
Perhaps he wanted to reward the man who was brave enough to sit in the front
row by taking his case first. Or maybe he needed to relieve the boredom of his
job by shaking things up a little bit. Regardless, he put the burden of getting
ourselves in proper order on us.
And that, I realized, was what the morning was all about.
Over and over I saw people whose lives were out of line stand before a
judge and try to make things right. Some had entered treatment programs and
were commended for their positive efforts. Others had parents with them to show
a strong support system. Many asked for more time to hire lawyers, pay fines,
or somehow get their lives back on track. The problem, as was painfully obvious this morning, is that
we can't accomplish that feat on our own...and we are running out of time.
Not expecting to be in the courtroom for the length of time
that I was, I was painfully aware towards the end of the experience that my
parking meter had expired some 45 minutes earlier. As it turned out, my
business took no time at all to accomplish. I gave my “no contest” plea to the
failure-to-yield charge against me and finally exited the courthouse with $165
less in my bank account than when I'd entered three hours earlier.
It was a good reminder, however, that as the world as we know it accelerates toward end time events, our own final court appearance looms ever closer, a day when we will stand before God Almighty and be judged according to the lives we have led. Happy then will we be if at some point we turned them over to Jesus, our Advocate, who will stand beside us and declare our debt to have been paid in full on the basis of His actions alone. Should we instead on that day find ourselves having failed to yield control of our lives to the One who loved us and died for us, it will cost us a whole lot more than a few dollars out of our pocket and hours out of our day.
It was a good reminder, however, that as the world as we know it accelerates toward end time events, our own final court appearance looms ever closer, a day when we will stand before God Almighty and be judged according to the lives we have led. Happy then will we be if at some point we turned them over to Jesus, our Advocate, who will stand beside us and declare our debt to have been paid in full on the basis of His actions alone. Should we instead on that day find ourselves having failed to yield control of our lives to the One who loved us and died for us, it will cost us a whole lot more than a few dollars out of our pocket and hours out of our day.
“And all nations shall be gathered before Him. And He
shall separate them from one another, as a shepherd divides the sheep from the
goats. And indeed He shall set the sheep
on His right hand, but the goats off the left. Then the King shall say to those
on His right hand, Come, blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for
you from the foundation of the world…Then He also shall say to those on the left
hand, Depart from Me, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the Devil
and his angels…And these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous
into everlasting life.”
(Matthew 24:32,33,34,41,46)
