Slow Moving Vehicle

It's nice to get to the meeting about 15 minutes before it starts. There's time to greet people, find a seat, and no concern about possibly disturbing others by arriving late. Therefore you can understand my discomfort at the crawl with which our bus driver proceeded this afternoon. Any slower would be parking. As is sometimes the case, this bus driver had a young boy as helper, likely his son, whose job it is to bark out "Zihua!" to pedestrians in the hope they might like a ride to town that's slower than walking.

But instead of only the customary hollering out the door, this enterprising young man sometimes got out at stops to canvas the street for passengers.

The above photo shows him on the other side of the bus, outside my passenger window beckoning a family to board, which they did ... with aching slowness. Each bus here is a personal franchise, a private enterprise, and when the driver is hungry for business he fishes for passengers with a dragnet. If a person far away signals he wants a ride he need not hurry and he most certainly doesn't. He knows the bus will wait till Tuesday.

Oh no. Now the kid's asking

around in the pharmacy.

Anyway, to my great surprise, we made it to the meeting on time after all, just not as soon as I hoped.

The speaker made an interesting point about prayer. He read how Jonah prayed to be saved when swallowed by the 'huge fish.' (Jonah 2:1,2) Then Jonah 2:10 says, "In time Jehovah commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah out onto the dry land." The prayer was answered but only after "time" went by. So we need to be patient regarding some prayers. It occurred to me that Christ revealed how much time went by: "three days and three nights." (Matt. 12:39). Jonah's experience was to serve as a parallel of Christ being dead for a similar period of time. So Jehovah had a purpose to wait that long before answering Jonah's prayer. There's no reason to suspect Jonah knew anything about why he had to wait three days for rescue, but there *was* a reason. Same with us. We may not know the reason for the delay but it doesn't mean there isn't one. And a delay does not necessarily mean 'no.'

I took a photo of the hall as we were leaving for home ...