Ratt, Poison, and the Green Mini

The year was 1987 and somehow I ended up with free concert tickets at the Charleston Convention Center. It was not necessarily my style of music but free was free. The opening band was Ratt, a heavy metal rock band and the headliner was Poison, a combination I’m sure was orchestrated solely for promotional purposes and the hilarity of seeing the words Ratt Poison together on posters. Regardless, I teased my permed hair up as big as I could get it and saw this as a chance to finally wear the bright green leather mini-skirt that was hiding in my closet—after all there was no way I was going to see anyone I knew at this concert. You can imagine my surprise when I was walking through the arena and heard “Miss. Cowger”? I slowly turned, and locked eyes apologetically with a few shocked teenagers from the high school where I was student teaching. Turns out sometimes you get lost in the crowd and sometimes you can’t’ even if you try.
     Recently we attended my son’s college graduation. He was one of over 7,300 students crossing the stage during two days of celebration. Now imagine the ocean of parents and family attending each ceremony, with everyone then trying to find our specific graduate afterwards. We were all adrift in a sea of humanity. Packed together shoulder to shoulder, in one mass taking baby steps to places we didn’t know. It was so easy to simply get caught up in the flow, going off course, farther and farther away from our meet-up location. We held tightly to our family members as we shuffled along afraid of becoming separated and lost, never to be found again. The experience showed me how easy it is in life to mindlessly get caught up in the crowd because it takes less effort than being purposeful and intentional. Truth be told, that graduation day, very few of us actually knew what direction we were even supposed to be going. It made me wish we had formulated a plan beforehand.
     One person I admire for having a plan of action when it came to navigating a crowd was the woman who needed healing and whose story is recorded in all three Gospels: Matthew 9, Mark 5 and Luke 8. Imagine the scene: she had “bleeding issues” for twelve years and none of the treatments had worked. Could this Jesus really help? She believed it was worth the effort to try. She was desperate to get close to Him. All those years she had told people she was “unclean” so they wouldn’t get close to her as was the law—could this be the moment she would finally be clean? If she could just get close enough to Jesus! Have you ever felt like that? Tears sting my eyes as I write this because I know how badly I want to get closer to Him. Every single day I know I need him. As the woman wove her way through the moving crowd, closer and closer to Jesus, I wonder if the defeated words of imprisonment were still swirling around in her head…or maybe she said them softly under her breath barely audible as not to break the law completely. “Unclean. Unclean. Unclean.” And then finally she got within an arm’s length of Jesus and bravely reached out. When she made contact with Jesus, she knew immediately she was changed.
     May we hold onto people who help us not get lost in the crowd, get as close to Jesus as possible, and be changed. Sometimes this means getting away from the noise of the crowd so that we might hear our heart pounding as in Revelation 3:20 “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”

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