College friend Hal standing next to my first car, a 1968 Ford Fairlane, aka the “Ouchmobile.”
“The one thing you shouldn’t do is try to tell a cab driver how to get somewhere.”- Jimmy Fallon
If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.”- Psalm 139:9 (NIV)
It’s spring break of my senior year at Concordia Teachers College in River Forest, IL. On a crisp, cloudy morning, a car from a local driver education school pulls up in front of my parents’ Evergreen Park home. I anxiously walk out to the car and get behind the wheel. Like an expert cab driver, my driving instructor guides me south through city streets. I thought, “This sure beats the classroom simulator and fenced-in parking lot course that provided my first round of training at age sixteen. Just like the real world!”
However, I soon found myself approaching an entrance ramp to I-57. Speed limit 70 miles per hour. The instructor calmly directed me to get on the interstate. Consequently, fear vanished in seconds as I merged with traffic and accelerated to the speed limit. And when I returned home that day, I trusted my instructor’s ability to teach me how to handle any situation on the road. Four days later, I passed my Illinois driving test.
Writing in It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way, Proverbs 31 Ministries president Lysa TerKeurst imagines how much less anxiety, fear, angst, and heartbreak we’d have if we could truly trust God. To truly trust God means more than just saying we trust God because that’s what people expect Christians to say. Or singing words of trust in a hymn or praise song simply because they’re printed on the page. Hence, Ms. TerKeurst exhorts, we need marked moments. Lysa defines a marked moment as consisting of:
“A real live moment we can point to and remind ourselves that we declared we will trust God with this suffering. With this disappointment. With this situation.”
Yet, when adversity strikes, we want it all to go away. We want happy – normal – easy. Because our limited wisdom conceives of these things as components of a good plan. But only God, the quintessential cab driver, sees the full road ahead. God knows the best route to our final destination. If God granted us access to His vision, we’d likely stop halfway through and choose to abandon His plan. Also, we don’t possess the strength to see too much of God’s plan in advance. So, God reveals it daily. And we proceed slowly. As a result, Lysa stresses, we don’t have to:
- know the plan to trust there’s a plan
- feel good to trust there is good coming
- see evidence of changes to trust that it won’t always be this hard
So, Ms. TerKeurst suggests, close your eyes and fix your thoughts on Jesus. Invite Him in, rather than explain Him away. For disappointments give you a reason not to run away, but to turn a different way – to turn to Jesus.
