A Free Walker

If you’ve ever spent a spring day working outside in the Appalachian Mountains, you know how those rains sneak up on you. One minute you’re cleanin your yard up or fooling with a piece of equipment, and the next thing you know the clouds roll over and the sky opens up like somebody turned on a faucet. So you do what every sensible person does. You step inside the tool shed and pull out a bag chair and wait it out. The rain starts drumming on that old tin roof like a bluegrass band warming up, and you stand there looking out across the mountain. Bradford pears are glowing like somebody hung white lanterns all over the mountainside, and here and there you can spot a few old sarvis trees showing out in bright white, like they’re trying to call in some bees to make early honey. It’s the kind of peaceful scene that slows your breathing, settles your nerves, and before long your mind starts wandering down old memory trails…

It was the season you have heard me talk about, when a bunch of my buddies and I spent a lot of nights in the woods running dogs. Now coon hunting is about dogs, no doubt about that, but it’s also one of the few kinds of hunting where a man can talk while he walks. You cover miles under the stars, boots crunching leaves, dogs working out ahead of you, and somewhere along the way life gets talked about. A lot of the best friendships I’ve ever had were built in these mountains following hounds.

One day a buddy of mine hollered at me and said a guy he worked with had a Treeing Walker coonhound he didn’t have time to hunt anymore. The fellow said if my friend wanted the dog, he could drive over to Kentucky and just have him. Now if you’re new to the dog-trading world, that sounds like the kindness of a saint. But if you’ve been around dog and horse traders long enough, you learn the gift of interpretation. “Free dog” often means, “This scudder won’t tree a coon if you tied one to the tree, runs every trashy thing in the woods, their buddies they hunt with know it and they won’t take it, and I’d rather you feed him than me.” I’ve often said dog traders and politicians have something in common. If they tell you something is free it’s going to cost you.

But we were young and naïve and thought we had stumbled onto the deal of the century. So that evening after work, Walter, Mikey, and I piled into the truck and headed toward Kentucky in the rain. This was before GPS, and before that lady Siri was even born. We were navigating by handwritten directions that looked like they had been copied off a napkin, and the rain had smudged them getting in the truck.

Before long we were lost on top of some mountain in Kentucky on a one-lane road where I’m fairly certain we passed Moses and Elijah riding a bicycle. Eventually we came down the other side onto another skinny road. No houses, no lights, just rain pouring down.

Then we saw it.

Up ahead in the middle of the road sat a car. No lights on. Just parked there in the darkness. As we got closer we realized there was a young girl standing beside it. She had on shorts and a tank top, shivering in the cold rain, and I’m pretty sure she was about fifteen months pregnant because that belly had already gone from a carry on to checked package.

So there we were, three fellers in the middle of nowhere Kentucky, looking at a cold, soaked, pregnant young woman stranded on a dark road.

Had it been another man we would have said, “You can’t park there.” and laughed. But instead we rolled down the windows and asked what was wrong.

With that tired look that only comes from exhaustion and worry all mixed together, she said, “I’ve run out of gas.”

From the way we had driven to get there, the nearest gas station might as well have been in Texas. For a moment we just stood there wondering what in the world we could do.

Then Walter snapped his fingers.

He said, “You know what? This morning, I filled up my gas jug and threw it in the back of the truck. I never carry gas because it spills everywhere, but I forgot to take it out.”

Five gallons of gas sitting there like it had been waiting all day for that exact moment.

We told her to get inside her car where it was dry. Then we poured that gas into her car on the side of that lonely Kentucky road. When we finished, we told her something simple but true.

“God must have put us here tonight with this gas jug, so you’d know He sees you and He loves you.”

Then we asked if we could pray with her and standing there in the rain, we did.

Jesus once told a story that sounded a lot like that kind of moment. In Luke 10:33–34 (ESV) He said, "But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds.”

The Samaritan wasn’t planning a ministry trip that day. He was just traveling down the road. But God turned a normal day into a divine appointment.

Jesus later said something else that always sticks with me. In Matthew 25:35–40 (ESV) He said:

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me… Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

These are simply the signs of a believer and what we are expected to do.

Well, after we got that girl back on the road, we finished our journey, found the man’s house, and loaded up that free pretty Treeing Walker hound. We hauled him all the way back to Grundy. Walter fed him about a week, and then we took him out to hunt.

Walter snapped the leash off that dog…and we never saw him again.

That rascal never treed, never barked, never came back, and never showed up at the pound. He just vanished into these Virginia mountains like a ghost with long ears. I’m fairly certain one night years later when I was watching professional corn hole on tv, I might have seen that dog run past in the background

But the older I get, the more I wonder if that rainy night trip to Kentucky was ever really about a dog in the first place.

Maybe God just used a “free hound” and a bunch of young hunters to put a gas jug exactly where it needed to be. So, a young lady who God only knows what she was going through got reminded He is with her.

Because sometimes we think we’re chasing dogs, or hobbies, or plans of our own. Meanwhile God is quietly arranging moments where someone is wounded on the way or runs out of gas in the middle of a dark road and just needs a little help.

The Bible says in 2 Timothy 4:2 “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season” this is just telling us we need to be prayed up and ready every day for what God might do in front of us. Divine appointments.

And if we slow down long enough to notice the people in front of us, look up at people instead of at our problems or our phones or other distractions. We might just discover that the most important thing we did all week had nothing to do with what we thought we were going after.

As Romans 8:28 (ESV) reminds us: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”

Sometimes that “all things” includes a free walker hound, a rainy night, a wrong turn in Kentucky, a gas jug in the back of a truck… and a lesson about Gods timing you never forget.