Thanks to the White Line

A few years ago there was quoted in a widely read devotional quarterly the following sentence from a personal letter:  “The fog was terrible: we had to creep along at five miles an hour, but arrived home safe and sound—thanks to the white line.”

There is a sermon in that sentence—perhaps many of them.  We often find the road of daily living obscured with a heavy fog; the future is uncertain; our duties are not clear; the effects of our acts are largely hidden from us; and what seems to be clearly our rights bring us into a clash with others.

Obscurity means danger.  “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” was the word of God through Hosea.  On the road of daily living we are endanger ourselves and we endanger others.  In the midst of the intricate relationships of our daily lives the unfortunate attitudes and habits of others may be communicated to us and we may injure others by our own example.

For the Christian there is a white line down the middle of the roadway of daily living.  It is the example and teaching of Jesus.  It does not afford us minute rules of conduct for every situation, but it encourages attitudes and enjoins principles that will help to keep us in the way.  To give single-hearted devotion to God is surely the best way to escape the contamination of secularism, and to adopt the redemptive attitude of our heavenly Father is surely the best way of working no ill to our neighbor.

The White Line is not always easy to follow.  It is obscured by the accumulation of theorizing that has gone on about the meaning of Jesus’ life and teaching.  It is obscured by the moral failures of many of the professed followers of Jesus.  But if a person will focus his eyes, not upon the fog but upon Jesus himself, he will be able to see enough of his duty to move forward.  One will often have to “creep along at five miles an hour,” or even five miles a day, but he will not have to stop.  In fact to stop is to endanger both himself and those behind him.

The White Line will lead us home, home to life’s haven of inner happiness and well-being, to joy of rich fellowship and fullness of life.  He who is “the way and the truth and the life” will bring us safely through the fog into the warmth and light of our eternal home.

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