Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

 When Bonnie and I were living in Connecticut, we used to live near the “Boston Post Road” which ran right through the middle of town.  Until Interstate 95 was built, it was the primary route from New York City to Boston and dated back to the early nineteenth century.  Long-time residents used to talk about how the road would be packed on Saturdays when Yale was playing Princeton or Harvard.  Today, the “Boston Post Road” is better known as Route 1.
     I always thought the “Post Road” got its name from being the primary route for the postal service between two great cities and everything in between.  As it turns out, that was only partially right.  It wasn’t the postal service that lent its name to the post road, but the other way around.
     The word “post” is derived from the Latin postis which referred to an upright timber (a post) to which notices could be attached.  Medieval couriers were “riders of the posts”; mounting fresh horses at each post on their route and then riding on.  In time, the posts became post houses where fresh horses were kept, and then post roads became those roads along which post houses could be found. 

     As the mail system evolved, it was only natural that those carrying it would use the post roads, and eventually the word “post” began to be used first of the carriers (“posthaste” was the means by which a courier was informed the message was urgent, as in “haste, post, haste”), and then of the mail itself.  “Postal” and “postage” are variations of the original word, and “to post” gradually evolved from carrying the mail in this way to placing a piece of mail into the system. 
     Have you ever heard of a “post chaise”?  If you’ve read Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, or William Thackeray you have probably come across a reference to one.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a post chaise was a kind of carriage that was smaller and lighter than a stagecoach.  It was designed to carry just two or three passengers, and unlike other carriages of the time, the driver would actually ride not on the carriage itself, but out in front on one of a pair of horses.  You can see where this is going.  A “post chaise” traveled on post roads to maximize the speed and distance covered by changing horses every ten or fifteen miles at a post house.  At the time, this was the “Concorde jet” of distance traveling. 
     At one level, the distance between us and God is so great as to be immeasurable.  The “Tower of Babel” was the first effort to reach the heavens, and we all know how that turned out.  We can’t reach God; the chasm between us is simply too great.  But God has reached us, creating a bridge across that great chasm in the gift of His Son.  Because of Jesus, we don’t have to post a letter and wait.  Because of him, we don’t have to post at all. 
     Through Jesus, God is right here, with us always, and we can approach the Creator of all that is with the same confidence, and in the same spirit as children approaching their loving parent.

“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” (1 John 3:1)