Access

Somehow we hooked up with Missy a couple of hours before the race last Saturday at Lowes Motor Speedway.  She works with Motor Racing Outreach.  She wanted to take us to the chapel that happens before the race.  So we followed her.  She walks us thru the infield and thru a gate in one of the chain link fences.  There’s an official at the gate and she tells him we’re with her and he waves us in.  The crowd is thinner here.  Then another fence with another gate and official and she draws big circles with her hand over us and says, “They’re with me.”

We walk past trucks and RV’s, but not the campers of the fans elsewhere in the infield -- these are really big, clean, modern homes on wheels.  Gee, are these driver RV’s?  Then we’re waved thru another fence and gate.  And then thru doors into one of the long pit garages that’s empty of cars and filled with people.   

Everyone here either belongs by NASCAR birth or they have credentials or they’re with the right person.  In the old days in Israel there was a temple with outer courts for the regular folk and inner courts the more of an insider you were.  In the very middle was the ultra-exclusive holy of holies.  This is it.  It’s like we’re with Jesus and as long as we follow him we go anywhere he does.

The pre-race drivers meeting is happening at the other end.  I’ve heard of this -- I didn’t know humans were allowed in.  Most of the people inside are lining a walkway waiting for the meeting to end so they can watch the drivers leave.  We hear Richard Petty and Bill France introduced.  It’s like being on the mountain with Jesus, and Moses and Elijah appear.  I felt like building them all a little shelter thing.  The meeting ends, most of the drivers leave thru the crowd and we go take our seats for the chapel.

Missy is next to me and whispers that Bobby Labonte is sitting on her other side.  She says behind us on the left is Bill Elliot, and Mark Martin and Matt Kenseth are over our right shoulder.  I don’t look – I might be struck dead.  The band Mercy Me is standing at the back.  Because we’re with Missy, we sit.  A mix of drivers, crews, family members, NASCAR people and don’t-really-belong-here’s like us all listen together to a message on who Jesus is and what he’s done, and we sing Mighty to Save with a lone guitar player at the front. 

Surrounding this garage are 150,000 people with a variety of beliefs and lifestyles, all living out those beliefs and lifestyles their own way before the race.  You see some loud and sloppy and rude and crude.  Most don’t realize that in the very heart of the speedway, the place where access is most coveted, in the middle of all the power and business and money and competition, an hour before all the gentlemen start their engines, there’s a quiet little holy place where some insiders and outsiders have come voluntarily to bow their heads.

What if all the outsiders could get in?  No guards, no gates, no credentials, no passes, no connections, no family birthright.  What if all you had to do was acknowledge your total unworthiness to be in that garage, put all your trust in only one person to get you in, and agree to quit living your own way?  Would it need to be bigger?

There are invisible eternal things going on around us daily that you’d never suspect.  Once in awhile you get to see one, and it reminds you there are others you might notice if you were sensitive. 

Comments

[Abbie]

I hope and pray that it WOULD need to be bigger, but I just don't know. A free gift, free access and so many choose to reject and ignore. It just breaks my heart. I pray that God will help me live my life to show others what they, too, can have!

[magnaflow 16707]

great write up