SAW THEM GOT YOU

“I SAW THEM, BUT GOT YOU” Saturday, February 15, 2020 By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman Some traffic tickets are more memorable than others. I do not recall my first ticket. Others have followed it. One more memorable example is this: One Easter Sunday morning in 1975, our car was stopped in South Carolina by a state highway patrolman. Ours was the last car in a long convoy heading back to D.C. from out of Atlanta. We all had all been “getting up pretty good” as the good ole boys used to say, back in the day. Of course, by me being the last, I was getting up the least of these. Stated differently-- they had been “getting up pretty good.” I was merely, more or less, tagging along “at the back door” as truckers and CB-radio folks used to say. We may have run along, like that, for about 50 miles, when we approached a high hill on I-95 north. The Holy Spirit said “Break it down!” I had barely taken my foot off of the gas, off the accelerator, when I saw him, “with his ears on.” And he saw me! “Now ain’t this a bite,” I said to myself, more or less. “Now, please tell me, what self-respecting, South Carolina State Highway Patrolman, is going to be out here on the highway, instead of in some church, on this bright Easter Sunday morning--for Christ’s sake!--writing speeding tickets?” I groaned audibly. Anyhow, that long, D.C.-tagged, vehicular convoy, meanwhile, kept right on “getting up pretty good”! Gone! The officer pulled me over and approached. I said nothing until after he spoke. ”I clocked you going 80 miles per hour in a mph 55 speed zone. Hand me your license and insurance, please.” I complied. When he had written the ticket and returned to my car with it, I confessed. “Officer, I admit that I was surely speeding. But you must’ve seen that convoy of 20 or more cars that was speeding ahead of me.” He replied: “Yes. I saw them. But I got you.” He tipped his hat and was gone. THE END