RIDING IN THE PASSENGER SEAT

It is probably safe to say that 99% of the time that I am in a car I am doing the driving. It is not that I do not trust anyone else to do the driving for me. My wife is a better driver than I am. It is not a macho thing either. I do not have a need to be in control. It is simply the fact that most of the time when I am in a car, I am driving. Now that we are down to one car because we now have found no need to have two, we share the driving; but I still do most of it.

On those rare occasions when I am sitting in the passenger seat, I rediscover the truth that I miss most of what I would have seen had I not been driving. I see things that I never saw before even though I have passed them hundreds of times. That is as it should be. If I were to look around while driving to see all those sights I see when I am sitting in the passenger seat, I would not have a driver's license. I might not even be alive to ponder such thoughts. 

The truth of the matter, however, is that I need to leave the driving to someone else more often than I do, literally and figuratively. I suspect we all do. It is so easy, all too easy, to get tunnel vision, to see everything from one perspective. When we become so myopic, we also so easily insist that what we see is really the truth, the whole of reality. But the truth is that we don't know the half of it because we have seen or experienced even less than that.

But the only way that we can see from another perspective is to deliberately take another seat. It is truthfully said that we cannot know how another sees life until we walk in that other person's shoes and walk in them for quite a few miles. So, too, the only way we can get another view of the reality that is our life is to be willing to deliberately take a look from another perspective. Doing so may not make us change our mind, nor does it have to because our view may be the correct one; but at least we have something to which we can compare our original beliefs.

That is not to say that what we believe is wrong. It is simply to say that, as someone else has observed, the unexamined life is really not a life worth living. The examined life presumes that we change seats every once in a while and that we change them intentionally and willingly. Those are the operative words intentionally and willingly.  It must be our choice to change seats, if you will. When we are forced to do anything, our first reaction is to resist and resist mightily. If someone forces us to examine our faith by pushing his beliefs on us, we tend to instantly close our minds to what we hear and defend our beliefs with all that we have.

But examine our life and our faith we must if only to allow ourselves to grow in that faith. Faith, like life, is never static. It either grows or it dies. It does not remain the same because faith, like life, is a living reality. Growing in our faith is akin to intentionally asking my spouse to take the wheel so that I can see some of what I have been missing when I have been in the driver's seat. We need to take a ride in the passenger seat of faith -- often.  Move over and see what you’ve been missing!