There is a dent in my fender. A $750 dent. It wasn't my fault. This time. I wasn't even there. Plenty of people saw it happen. Except me. But I have seen the result. Luckily I don't have to pay for it. The poor girl whose fault it is will be paying or half of it. Her mother is paying the other half. She's had her license for two months, poor thing. Her mother was making dinner and needed shrimp and sent her daughter to the store. Daughter knew she needed to hurry, so she pulled up behind some parked cars, didn't bother using a parking space and ran in to get the shrimp. Only she forgot the to put on the emergency brake. It was a 5 gear and she left it in neutral. Nobody touched her car. It just started rolling. Okay somebody did touch her car. After it was rolling. He tried to stop it but the momentum was too strong and there was nothing he could do. Then, voila! Her car stopped rolling. Because it had just collided with mine. Oops! She was a good girl. She stayed to take responsibility. And she called her mother. First, before doing anything else. Her mother came immediately, and had a hard time controlling her anger and frustration. She told me later she didn't have the heart to tell her daughter that she had gotten the wrong kind of shrimp.
It made for a great family discussion. What is so dangerous about being neutral in our lives? Well, kind of like this car. If we don't make decisions ahead of time about what we will and won't do, what we want out of our lives, what we want to accomplish, we may very well end up someplace we don't want to be. And it won't be because we made any effort to get there. We will have just ended up there somehow. Pulled by gravity, or laziness, or lack of purpose, no clear set goals and standards. James describes it like this: James 1:6 - "For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed." Just like nature pulled her car to where she never intended it to go, unchecked, our natures can pull us to where we never intended to go. Unless....we get it in gear. Apply the brakes. Figure out where we want to go and where we don't. Change our very nature. But how to get it in gear? James says it again. James 1:22 "Be ye doers of the word, not hearers only, deceiving your own selves."
I am so grateful for all the things I have learned by trying to follow my Savior. It gives me purpose, direction, comfort, joy and so much more. In short, it helps me get it in gear. Know when I need to apply the brakes. Get where I want to go.
