Roadside assistance

I don’t know if studies have been conducted on how effective religious billboards are. But billboards batted 100 percent in the case of my Jewish Christian friend Jenny, who was ambushed into the kingdom by them on Pennsylvania roads. So I am bullish on billboards. She just reminded me in a text message:

“It was a billboard with Jesus standing open armed that said, ‘Jesus is with you.’ Then I saw one shortly after that trip to the mountains that said, ‘Jesus loves you.’ The even crazier part was the first night in the cabin (seriously rustic, no running water and battery power) there was a radio on all night that started out as rock and roll, but when I woke up early in the morning there was a Christian radio station on. Guess someone was trying to get my attention.”

A billboard in Saugatuck, Mich., made my honeymoon extra special. It was on the long side, so we pulled over to read it and took a photo:

“For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

A shorter text would probably work best at high speeds on freeways. Among that laconic club are:

“Hell is real,” “Jesus is the answer,” and “Repent.”

Sometimes religious billboards seem overly confrontational, but you know, we don’t have that kind of time.

Sometimes billboards have conversations with other billboards. A two-word appeal reading “Straight? Unhappy?” followed by a web address is answered somewhere in America with another that says, “Gay? Unhappy?” directing readers to a different resource.

I saw a billboard on Broad Street in Philadelphia on my way to the dentist recently. It said,

“Choose your master: yourself or Jesus.”

I wonder what response that one will fetch. It could go either way. I would figure many people like the idea of having themselves as their master: You go where you want, you say what you want, you think what you want, you consume what you want, you sleep with whom you want. Of course, the downside of that kind of self-mastery is: You go where you want, you say what you want, you think what you want, you consume what you want, you sleep with whom you want. It catches up in the end.

The only people who are totally free of a master are pimps and vagabonds. And even that’s not true. People without Jesus for a master are mastered by everything but Jesus—their lusts, their past, their regrets, their moods, and the opinion and fear of other people.

Scottish theologian P.T. Forsythe said that the soul’s first duty is not to find its freedom but to find its master. This is not only morally right but actually the only way anyone can live. For like Bob Dylan once said, “You gotta serve somebody.” They ought to make a billboard of that.