SOMETIMES A METAPHOR FOR LIFE

Awhile back in the comic strip Shoe Shoe is stopped by a traffic cop who says to him: “Do you realize you’re headed the wrong way on a one-way street?” Shoe’s response: “Talk about a metaphor for life.”

Indeed, talk about it! We’ve all driven down that street, sometimes, is seems, in the middle of the night with our headlights out in a strange city. We wonder how we ever got there as being there was never our intention. And we wonder even more how we will find our way out. Such a situation may not happen these days with most everyone having a smart phone with a GPS app included.

Unfortunately the human body does not come with a built in GPS to guide us through life and prevent us from driving down a one-way street the wrong way or to make sure we always drive in the right direction to the place we are supposed to go. Even more, there is nothing internal that even lets us know what that right place is. There are times when we fly by the seat of our pants through life hoping we are on the right street going in the right direction to the place we are supposed to be heading.

Fortunately for us and fortunately for the world, those times are not all that common even though, when they do occur, we think we’ve been there too many times already and should have known better or prepared better when we started out. For if those times were all too many, our life would be a mess. And if everyone were like us, imagine what a mess the world would be in!

Come to think of it, maybe the world is in the mess the world is in because all too many of us keep driving down one-way streets the wrong way. What is worse, we often do not discover that that is what we are doing until some sort of traffic cop stops us and prevents us from going further and getting into real trouble. But not always and with no the harm we bring to ourselves and to those we injure because we are going the wrong way.

In fact, we do have an internal GPS that is supposed to show us the way through life, keep us on the straight and narrow, and prevent us from harming ourselves and everyone else. That GPS is our faith. For the most part in this life, we know when we are heading down the wrong street in the wrong direction. We know when we are doing what we know we should not be doing and not doing what we know we should be doing. And we do not need some kind of policeman to stop us in our tracks and call us on it. We know.

We knew when we started down the wrong road. We knew it when we were travelling that road. And we knew we had no one else to blame but ourselves. The opposite is true as well. Wouldn’t a better metaphor for life and for this new year be this: always drive to the right place in the right way in the right direction? We can. Our faith will show us how and the way. Happy New Year!