When Mary Grace was about 18 months old, she started having asthma problems. Any kind of a cold or virus would push her into long and sometimes scary asthma attacks.

One night, she got bad enough that Susan noticed she was having retractions—where the whole belly and chest seemed to move as she struggled to breathe. Susan said, “You’d better take her to the emergency room.”

That was something of a tip-off. Susan, a nurse, tends not to overreact to these situations. She’s generally pretty calm about medical stuff. But on this occasion, I snapped to the realization that Mary was pretty sick.

Now, if you’re basically slow-witted—as I sometimes seem to be—part of the challenge you face in navigating life is that you don’t always pick up on signals in the environment that suggest danger. But on this occasion, I sensed right away that something wasn’t right. Susan sounded genuinely afraid.

If you are, as I say, constitutionally prone to cluelessness, it behooves you to figure out who in your life you should look to when it’s time to be afraid. I used to tell my kids—sometimes I still do—that while I know things might look scary, I’m not afraid. Then I’ll tell them that I’ll let them know when it’s time to be scared. In this case, however, I didn’t need Susan to say the words out loud; I could see it in her face.

So, I bundled Mary up, put her in the car seat, and tore off to Middlesboro Appalachian Regional Hospital. Immediately, they put a pulse oximeter on her tiny toe—and her oxygen levels were dangerously low. They immediately took us to a special room where they did more work to get her vitals. Then they left.

And I sat in a tiny room with a little bundle of asthmatic terror. It’s difficult to describe how alone you feel when you know something is terribly wrong with your child and you don’t see anyone on the immediate horizon motivated by the same sense of urgency you happen to feel. Just you and a baby struggling to breathe, looking at faded posters explaining the dangers of smoking or the onset of emphysema. The world—which felt utterly ordinary just hours earlier—now felt like a hostile and forbidding place, cast in shadows and echoes.

So, there we sat: my little girl struggling to breathe and me—an oblivious young father now paralyzed by fear of the unknown and the debilitating sense of struggling alone.

I eventually saw a big man standing in the doorway when I looked up. And I immediately relaxed. “How’s our little girl?” my buddy, Mary Grace’s godfather, Bill Bisceglia, asked.

As many of you know, Bill is a funeral director—which, though it sounds frightening, was a massive relief because Bill was also the deputy coroner—which meant that he knew everybody in town. So, when I asked how he knew we were there, he said that someone in the E.R. had recognized me and called him to tell him that I was there with my daughter.

He then went on to tell me that he’d called the E.R. doctor on duty and told him to take special care of us.

“I had to make sure our baby girl was all right.” He smiled just as the doctor walked in.

That ever happened to you? You’re out on your own in unfamiliar territory, and you see a face that immediately puts you at ease. You may or may not know the person, but somehow that face gives just enough strength or direction to carry on.

Philippi was bound to be interesting for Paul, Silas, Timothy, and company. If you go back to verse six, you see that the Holy Spirit didn’t allow them to speak a word in Asia. Then, in verse seven, they were prevented from going to Bythinia by “the Spirit of Jesus.” They were presumably tired of this scavenger hunt and finally headed off to Troas.

On the way, though, Paul had a vision of a Macedonian man pleading with Paul’s company to come to Macedonia to help the folks there. Convinced, as Luke tells us, that God had called them “to proclaim the good news to them,” Paul and the gang headed for Philippi by way of Samothrace and Neapolis.

So, of course, Philippi was bound to be interesting.

Why do I say that?

Well, think about it. Paul and Silas had set out for Antioch from Jerusalem back in chapter fifteen. They were on official business. Apparently, there’d been a big flap in the Jerusalem church over whether these new Gentile converts that had started popping up since Peter went to Cornelius’s house had to be circumcised to become Christians. That is to say, did they have to become Jews first to make themselves respectable Christians? Remember, they were all Jews at this point—even the Christians were Jews.

My buddy, Greg Davis’ dad, the Jewish doctor from Knoxville, was eating at a drug store counter a few years ago—trying to relive some memories from the Civil Rights era—when an enthusiastic young man sidled up next to him. The young guy with really nice hair leaned over from the next stool and said, “Do you know Jesus?”