YANKEES SOLVE?

“But I say unto you, Love your enemies...”  (from Matthew 5:44)

I just returned from  “enemy territory”, that is, the suburbs of New York City!  Now, I’m not a FANATICAL Red Sox fan, but I DO like the Red Sox and I certainly don’t like the Yankees!  (I’m also not big on the Giants, and I can take or leave the Jets and the Mets.)

I was attending one of the ten New York City satellite locations of the Willow Creek Leadership Summit at Harvest Time Church in Greenwich, Connecticut.  (Perhaps I will talk about that conference more in the future.)  I had never been to the Greenwich church before.  It is literally right on the New York state line in the northwestern section of the town of Greenwich.  Literally right next door to the church is the Westchester County (NY) airport.  There were jets and commuter planes taking off all the time.  I thought it was kind of cool.  It was more fun than listening to the trains all the time in downtown Framingham.  The church building seated around 200 and was a first-class facility.  (Boy would I love it if our church had a facility like that, and I hope that’s not considered “coveting”!)

The conference was all day Thursday and all day Friday.  I stayed on Friday night at the Courtyard Marriot in Rye, New York, about ten miles south of the church.  I had a terrible time finding the hotel on Thursday evening.  I finally stopped in a strip mall parking lot and asked three forty-ish guys who were standing and talking in the parking lot.  Hearing I was from Boston they immediately asked, “Are you a Yankees fan?!”  

“I think we’ll have to declare a truce on that one!” I replied.

One said, “Right now, you’re a Yankees fan!”

One of them had me follow him and he led me right to the hotel.  It was only about a mile from that location but would have been very tricky for me to find as it involved a small traffic circle (Massachusetts is NOT the only state with “Rotaries”) and sort of a convoluted route that I would have found difficult.  The guy smiled and told me, “I lived in Brookline, MA for a number of years!”

Seriously, these Yankees fans were very sympathetic and more than helpful to me.  When I think about that young guy in Falmouth a few weeks ago who attacked a guy just because there were New York plates on his car, I feel kind of embarrassed.  I know people usually say “Yankees S__k!”  But I’ll say, “No in THIS case, Yankees SOLVE.  They solved my situation and let me to the hotel!”