Equipped to watch

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what a sentinel is. One of the big concepts I’ve come to embrace is that the sentinel is someone who is part of something greater than himself—someone who stands at the boundary or perimeter of that activity, ready to defend it against something that might interrupt it. For myself, I’ve identified this activity as being a kind of prayer sentinel—so I try to be at the boundary of my own thought, defending concepts that I’ve found helpful and that I think are beneficial to others. As a follower of Christ Jesus, the main concept that I’ve come to value is that God is good and is loving, so God’s creation must be loved and good as well. 

A number of years ago I was teaching in Malawi, Africa, in an area where traffic accidents were pretty common. My school was a couple of hundred feet from the main highway running north and south, and one day, a fellow teacher and I heard the unmistakable sound of tires screeching and then an impact. We immediately started walking toward the road. On the way there, I stopped and stepped off the path, just to pray. It was a prayer to acknowledge that God was present, and that God would guide me. I wanted to be able to help and contribute in whatever way I could. 

So, as I was going down, I asked some of the students from our school to go up and down the road, and to alert any approaching vehicles to the accident site ahead. (The accident had taken place near a large turn, and the other cars needed to know that there was an accident there so they would have time to stop.) When I got down to the accident site, I found one of the two students that I’d asked to go up the road, standing there frozen. He hadn’t gone up and posted the warning as I’d requested. So I immediately started up the road, just making sure that anyone driving that way would be protected from doing any harm to themselves or others.

I got up to the area where the bend started opening up, and sure enough, there was a van coming, traveling at a pretty good rate of speed. I waved like crazy, and the van immediately started slowing down, and it was able to stop prior to hitting anyone or anything. I felt that my prayers were clearly beneficial to others because I’d been led to pay attention to the other traffic on the road, and I was really the only one going away from the accident and protecting that space. 

Another experience that I was involved in really illustrated the idea of God as a refuge. I was visiting a friend in an isolated part of Malawi, and the trip involved crowded travel in the back of a pickup truck. The road that we traveled on was dirt, and since it wasn’t policed, people would drive at very high speeds, and there was usually at least one vehicle off the road from a previous incident. On this particular day, the driver of the truck was driving way too fast, and it became clear that this was irresponsible driving on his part—it seemed as if he was trying to impress someone. At numerous points the truck would slide off the road toward the ditch.

I defended the idea that God’s will is for each of us to be able to travel safely.

During this time I had been acknowledging, in prayer, that God was in control and would keep us safe. And as I continued in this prayer, there was a beautiful illustration that helped lift the sense of fear for me. A woman, who was sitting right next to me, was holding a baby tightly. It was such a sweet example of tender care. As I prayed to enlarge my concept of God’s care, I saw that her care for the baby really exemplified God’s care for everybody in the vehicle—even the driver. I could expect that God would meet that driver’s need, and that he didn’t have to drive fast to impress anyone.

I just became very still with that concept, and I felt at peace, regardless of how fast we were going. Very soon after, the driver did slow down to a normal pace, and, except for one tiny portion of the drive, it was completely peaceful. I think this was another example of how that sentinel approach kept others safe and benefited me as well.

After my time in Malawi, I took some time off to travel, and I went up toward Egypt. As I was going from Tanzania to Uganda, I was traveling on a bus with about 35 people, and I was still very much defending that idea that God’s will is for each of us to be able to travel safely. As we were traveling, I saw a sign on the side of the road that said, “Keep Tanzania Safe. Drive Safely.” To me, it was implying that each person is responsible for that safety. But my first response was, “Well, that’s not enough. One person may choose to drive safely, and others may not.” I felt that there had to be something better than that. Soon the thought came that God is the governing intelligence behind all right action. This intelligence is seen clearly in good driving. 

Within minutes, as we were cresting a hill, we saw two trucks coming in the opposite direction—one in the opposing lane of travel, and one in our lane of travel. It was clear that we would not all be able to stop in time to avoid each other. Now, at that particular moment, on the side of the highway, there were no trees, no people, no animals, no houses—none of the things that had been on the side of the road for so much of the trip until then. The driver was able to pull off to avoid the oncoming truck—we had a couple of bumps along the way—and as we pulled back onto the road, you can imagine the cheers from everybody on the bus. We just kept right on going.

These three examples illustrate for me the importance of being a sentinel. It’s very much in keeping with something Mary Baker Eddy wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts” (p. 261 ). If a sentinel is someone who’s part of something much greater or larger, then “the enduring, the good, and the true” are already there. As sentinels, we’re witnessing that fact and defending that concept in our own thoughts.