Truckers are springing from every Canadian community, channeling into our highways, and set to pool in a great-lake-size protest in the Ottawa Valley next week, demanding that our governments on all levels cease and desist from all COVID related mandates. A Niagara of Peterbilts, Kenworths, Macks and you name the truck are pouring into the nation’s capital from Cape Breton, Windsor, the Frasier River Delta and every town and city in between. It’s a display of national unity that is as hopeful as it is rare.
Since March 2020, governments have changed mandates and offered hollow promises, heralding the good news that they will rescue us from a disease, only to defer hope with every vanishing target. The disease itself is a fraction of a fraction of a risk to most the population, but that hasn’t stopped our statist saviours from destroying businesses, dividing families, pushing persons to despair, and traumatizing children, among many other evils which they have inflicted upon the general population with their iron fist in the name of public health. It’s all for our good, donchaknow. Watching videos of convoys trucking to Ottawa has choked me up with tears more than once. That I have been so moved – something I am not quickly given to – has surprised me, but it’s revealed how much I’m longing for relief from this dark Canadian winter now almost in its twenty-third month and counting.
Evidently I’m only one of millions. Folks are filling overpasses and highway corridors, looking for some way to get involved whether with patriotic flag waving cheers or by offering baked goods to the convoy on route to Ottawa. Canadians are showing signs of life we have not seen since March 2020. Spring is in the air, and its still the dark cold of January. Truckers decided they had enough, and they are inspiring the nation to join them in their fight for freedom.
The idea is to park in front of Prime Minister Trudeau’s official residence at 24 Sussex Drive and then fill the entire city with their big rigs. Many are prepared to leave their rigs, seemingly shutting down the city, until all mandates are lifted nationwide. Some report that more than 500,000 persons – including truckers, family, friends, and supporters – are streaming into Ottawa. If you were to add up the number of soldiers in the Canadian forces with all the combined members of the Ottawa Police Service and Ontario Provincial Police, that still wouldn’t be half the number going to Ottawa. These truckers could be the force needed to end this miserable virus of government tyranny.
I would have preferred to see the Church take a collective stand across this country. No doubt the miniscule handful of faithful churches helped inspire courage and did push the government back some, even while rescuing sinners and witnessing to the worth of Jesus Christ by suffering for Him. But the overwhelming majority of pastors and churches proved faithless in what could have been their finest hour. They stopped worshipping, and they called it “worship.” And when they did gather their people, it was always in reduced capacity, dully masked and social distanced, double-vaxxed with Twitter posts to prove it, being sure to thank the Premier for his benevolent grace in letting them do what Jesus already commanded them to do. The church has divine power, historical precedent, and special constitutional protection – rights we’ve had since time immemorial – to stand up to despots. Instead, most reverted to never-seen-before ecclesiologies and novel exegetical work, hiding behind sloppy interpretations of Romans 13, while proclaiming how pious they are in supporting a government that robs their neighbours and ravages their homeland built by their ancestors.
Jesus told the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25—37. A man, almost dead on a roadside, was stripped, beaten and robbed. A priest and a Levite each passed the man, but each willfully chose to ignore him. But a Samaritan stopped to help, seeing to it that he was nursed back to health at the Samaritan’s expense. The religious men – a priest and a Levite – were too busy trying to look religious to help the man, and those same religious men were snooty hypocrites who would have considered the half-breed uncouth Samaritan as good as a dog. But the Samaritan had true religion, and the official religious leaders were frauds. Jesus intended to rebuke the religious leaders with the parable as much as he intended to illustrate true neighbourly love.
Are we watching a real-life Parable of the Good Samaritan play out before our eyes? For two years Canadian clergy have tripped over themselves trying to outdo one another over who can show greater compliance to a beastly state. The least of these languished away under the heavy jackboot of government, and the pastors told them to submit, parroting the state’s false gospel while getting excited that, at least for a season, they received more YouTube clicks then they once had persons attending church, all the while closing their doors to the despairing. Hiding from actual wolves attacking the flock, some self-adorned in full military regalia to slay their dreaded bogeyman of theonomy or correct the tone of the pastors who gathered. They call it “love of neighbour” and pat themselves on the back for how neighbourly they are, as if neighbourly love is somehow removed from the Law written in stone or on the flesh of regenerate hearts. The sheep scattered. Wolves devoured the flock. The pastors still got paid, and they heralded to the world how neighbourly they are.
Enter the convoy. Truckers might be a lot of things, but two things they are not are effete and sanctimonious. Not a few are highway philosophers who spend days on the open road digesting podcasts and audio books while pondering how the world works, but they couldn’t care less about the credentials and accolades of stuffy sycophants. They talk straight and tend to slice through pretense, no time for the fancy-pants bigheadedness which characterizes political and church leadership alike.
God uses the foolish things of this world to shame the wise, and I have a sneaking suspicion these truckers – straight talking and clear thinking as they are – are about to teach the pointy-headed a thing or two or three about neighbourliness. They are standing to fill a gap. Their neighbours’ faces are being ground up, and the truckers are standing. The pastors should have stood between the sheep and the wolves. Busier trying to look neighbourly than actually be neighbourly, they’re now being outpaced by 100,000 big rigs barreling through snow drifts on the Trans Canada Highway to face the wolf and drive him away. In one sense, the truckers are doing what the church should have done, and the nation is resurrecting from a slumber as the convoy pushes through inspiring courage in each passing town. Liberty from tyranny is starting to smell like burning diesel fuel. The truckers just might be the Good Samaritans we’ve been waiting for.
Now it could all go wrong. I hope it doesn’t. But, after all, “eff Trudeau” items are a trending sale on Amazon.ca, the chosen flags flying from a few of the trucks. At the very least, it’s a little amped. The clergy have already, for two years, cheered on a government that has put businesses and families and children and churches into a meat grinder. Most pulpits have no moral high ground left, at least to call out some rowdy truckers cursing at a God-hating tyrant. And if things do sour – let’s pray they don’t – but if they do, we can all remember that strides could have been made over a year ago, had the churches just been churches and the pastors just been pastors. The truckers are our neighbours, and they’re acting neighbourly. I’ll be at the 401 Thursday, at about 11:00 AM, cheering them on.
Breaker 1-9, this here’s Billy. Do ya copy, driver? Keep them bears off your backdoor, and we’ll catch ya on the flip-flop. Godspeed, and let them truckers roll!
