Tunnel To China

When a ten year old boy starts digging a hole something magical happens. My sister was planting a garden behind the garage and so I went back there to the loose soil, shovel in hand and the further I dug the more visions of adventure filled my mind. Imagine, if I dug far enough I would be in China, how cool would that be. Just imagine a tunnel to China right here in Naperville, Illinois. Maybe I’ll strike oil like the “The Beverly Hillbillies”, the next thing you know young Bruce’s a million heir. Gold, silver who knows what treasure awaits. Each shovel full of dirt brought more excitement. Worms, white grubs, the mystery of what kind of critter I could dig up kept me going for another hundred shovels full, maybe a mummy or a dinosaur. I might just find a civil war cannon or a musket. I’ll bet anything Jim Bowie could have dropped one of those big knives, or pirate treasure, “that’s it, ‘X’ marks the spot”, surely there was treasure here; I could feel it in my 10 year old bones. Wow, a whole summer to dig the world’s deepest hole.

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Dig I did and did and did and sure enough after a couple of days and employing several of the neighborhood kids into the adventure we had our selves a “Hole”, I’m telling you a hole. Four of us could all be digging at the same time and it was getting over our heads. Really, a very cool hole if ever there was one, it had become more of a mine than a hole. Then, all of the sudden, clank and clank the shovels had hit something. This could be it, this thing was big, pirate treasure for sure. We carefully dug all the dirt from around it scarping and digging until it was quite obvious we had hit a huge rock, maybe more of a boulder. We dug around where we could even get under it in some places but this boulder was bigger than all two of us and now what could we do? No way in the world we were going to lift it from the hole even if we could dig it out completely. We were stuck our adventure foiled, no way to make it to China with this boulder in our way.
There is something about a 10 year old boy that just refuses to go ask grownups for help. I was bound and determined this rock was not standing in the way of my tunnel to China. What I needed was fire power, dynamite would do the trick I’d seen it on plenty of it on TV shows and my mom used to tell me that we came from a long line of powder monkeys who worked on the roads in Up State New York; I was born for this kind of work. Dynamite would blow this rock out of the hole my problem solved. Bobby, down the street told me he could get us some M-80’s his family had bought on vacation in another state. Bobby said that one of the M-80’s was as powerful as one fourth a stick of dynamite. Simple enough, I reasoned, then we need four.

Off Bobby went for the M-80’s while we worked on the placement tunneling a shaft under the giant boulder. Not long and Bobby was back with the fire power. Naturally my powder monkey instincts were to get some string to get all the fuses wound together in order to get them all to blow at the same moment and then “BOOM!!!” four would mean an entire stick of dynamite this was going to be epic.

We then slid this minor’s weapon of mass destruction into our specially designed shaft. While the gang ran to the other side of the garage I lit the fuse and ran. In a moment I ran by all of them back across the neighbor’s yard one street over we ran and ran. “Maybe they were duds?” the thoughts flashed as I ran waiting for the explosion. Two streets over still running, it all comes back to me now is super slow motion and, “KABOOOOOM!!!!!”. Even that far away the earth shook, windows rattled I was fairly certain we had set off an earth quake.

Realizing I was born in 1955 and 10 years later it was 1965 do you think it is any coincidence that M-80’s were banned in the US as part of the Child Protection Act of 1966 , just sayin. By all means, kids don’t try this one at home!

In Acts 1:8 – Jesus said, “But you shall receive power (dynamis), after the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and you shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”

More than the firepower of those four M-80’s was Sam’s story that night 48 years later. Sam a dear friend was sitting with our band of brothers sharing about his father and how he was struggling to forgive him for something Sam didn’t even know if his father had really ever done. Sam went on to tell about his counseling session and how his counselor had instructed him to reach out to young Sam with Jesus help and allow Jesus to heal and reason with Sam’s younger self to get at a bitter root, (I’ll call it a bitter boulder for the purpose here if you don’t mind) that had kept Sam prisoner. Jesus had come after Sam that very day and now Sam was the “witness” on how Jesus had unearthed this boulder. The real issue turned out to be that Sam was struggling to forgive young Sam for a similar action. WOW what firepower, could it be that Jesus could do that for me? Could Jesus free me from the giant boulder in my life, the one that had always stopped me dead in sin and remorse? The one I was sure I couldn’t be healed from.

Two mornings later at 5am I started to pray and think and ask Jesus to come. Jesus please show me the boulder, like Sam I know you want me to be free. Memories came, more memories, “No that isn’t it, there must be something earlier back, back I went. Then there it was, I had long since buried it. I reasoned with Jesus, “this isn’t it is it?” I would try to go further back but Jesus kept bringing me right back and there I was face to face with the sin, oh I had been tricked into the situation but I was guilty. I was truly guilty.

Jesus said to the younger me, “Bruce, you know you were abused your innocence was stolen.”

I told him sure, “ I can see that now, Jesus”.  Satan had clearly put a younger Bruce somewhere he was in no way equipped to know how to react and Bruce had fallen and fallen hard.

Jesus shocked me with the next question, “Do you want your innocence back?” He offered it as a card an ‘innocence card’, “Do you want this?”

My heart wanted the card but my mind objected, “I can’t take it, I was guilty don’t you see I chose that sin and every sin that sprang up after that, Jesus I want it but I am so guilty.”

My mind raced back to a book I had been reading by John Owen the 17th century puritan where I recalled him saying that some of the sins of our sanctification required the deep cleansing of Jesus’ blood. At the time I read that I wondered what he meant but now it rushed like a flood over me at Jesus’ next question. “didn’t I pay enough?” KABOOOOOOM, what ever dynamis, Holy Spirit power is I experienced it at that moment. The boulder uprooted, I reached for my ‘innocence card’ and I have clung onto it ever since. I will wave it at Satan when ever temped, now it is the gift of gifts something I would have never ever believed possible.

Your story, dear reader of how Jesus has set you free could just be the dynamis that person sitting next to you needs. Share it often, share it because the story of God’s dynamis is what Paul was describing in 1:Cor 2:4 “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power.”

You don’t have to know all about God’s plan of salvation or the Roman road to witness, because what Jesus did in your life is DYNAMITE (dynamis)  I am telling you.

So, I am sure you are wondering what happened to the giant boulder of Naperville? Sirens and police cars everywhere kept us from returning to the scene of the crime too quickly as we knew M80’s weren’t legal in Illinois. When the smoke cleared, literally, a very sheepish scared gang peeped behind the garage to see our giant boulder was now free from its dark underworld; however our beautiful hole was now destroyed as the sides had all caved in leaving more of a crater than our beautiful shaft to China. How the police or our parents didn’t figure out who was responsible for that explosion goes along with a number of questions I will always ponder. But boy oh boy that was FIREPOWER.