It Ain't Natural

DateLine (10/26/06 – Naas, County Kildare, Ireland)

Back when Lou Holtz was still Football Coach at Carolina it became known that he had a list of 100 things that he wanted to do before he died. He had maintained the list over a period of time and at every opportunity was clicking them off. I wonder how many he has left? I have never formalized a list but I do have some things that I’d like to do before I die. As a matter of fact this week I did one and am still doing it. I’m back in Ireland on business this week. Heretofore I have taken advantage of a car service to cart me back and forth. I’ve never driven in Ireland; that is until this trip. Expecting this to be my last trip to Ireland, I decided to rent a car. The reason this merits clicking off a life goal is they drive on the wrong side of the road. Yes in Ireland you steer from the right hand side of the car and you drive on the left hand side of the road; “It ain’t natural.”

I can tell you that it’s been almost forty years since I have had to concentrate so much on my driving. Every driving instinct has to become a conscious thought. I didn’t realize how much my driving had become instinctual until this week. Some people might comment in my case driving is a case of bad instincts but that’s another story. To begin with you find yourself constantly approaching the car from the passenger side (left hand side.) The seat belt is not over your left shoulder it’s over your right shoulder. The rearview mirror is not to your right; it’s to your left. Cars pass you from your right, not your left. The manual shift is on the left, not your right. And just to throw a little curve at you, the accelerator is on the right and the turn signal is on the left like it is in a “normal” left hand driven car.

When you approach an intersection to turn, the cars don’t come from the direction your instinct tells you they should be. If I don’t keep my hand on the shift knob, I forget where to find the shifter. Yes that means I’ve typically driving with only one hand. I constantly have to look for the road markings and signs. And to make matters worse, those markings are not like US markings. One more twist; the country is full of roundabouts (i.e. traffic circles). You guessed it; traffic flows counterclockwise in a roundabout. OK, it’s not as bad as perhaps I’ve made it sound, but “it ain’t natural.” Don’t worry, I’m surviving. It’s actually kind of fun.

The Christian life is a lot like driving on the wrong side of the road. Our every instinct tells us to cross that center line. That’s because our instincts are born of the natural mind. Our intellect has to constantly remind us to stay left. Our knowledge of the rules of “driving” keeps us safe. We must know the rules and consciously follow them. Any lapse into instinct has the potential to cause us great harm. God directs our way through “roadside markings” and marks the hazards, sometimes going so far as to send a flagman to wave us off from danger. It takes our commitment, our concentration, and our discipline. To add an extra dimension of both danger and isolation, in the Christian life, a lot of people really are driving on the wrong side of the road; not the side that we drive on. It’s chaos.

“Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. For ‘who has known the mind of the LORD that he may instruct Him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.” I Corinthians 2:12-16

Moral of this story: Trust God, it ain’t natural, but it will save your life.