Driver’s Education
Years ago, I supplemented our income by working as a driving instructor. I taught teen-aged boys and girls in the car and in the classroom. It was an interesting experience, not always pleasant but ultimately enlightening. I hasten to add, however, that it wasn’t my students that enlightened me so much as the drivers with which we shared the road.
I’d had my own vehicle surgically altered for duty: an extra rearview mirror and a hydraulic brake on my side. I was told that, at one time, certain driver training vehicles came equipped with an extra steering wheel as well. Though I didn’t get one of those, it didn’t take me very long to see the practical benefit of such an alteration. In the year I spent riding with nervous, hormone-ridden teens, I sometimes wished that my car came equipped with armor plating as well. Yet, though a couple of my drivers gave me an anxious, even frightening, moment a time or two, they didn’t scare me nearly so much as the “seasoned” motorists we encountered.
Like the lady who followed us on a curvy, two-lane road. Double-yellow line; speed limit 35. The lady evidently wanted to go faster. She certainly followed closely enough to communicate that desire. You don’t have to be especially good at lip-reading to make out certain common obscenities spewing from a face contorted with anger. Meanwhile, my nervous, young student was worried. I tell him not to worry about her, but keep his eyes on the road and maintain the legal speed.
Eventually, the lady passed us on the double-yellow line. My student breathed a sigh of relief. I said, “Now, you just watch.” Sure enough, within a minute, we pulled up behind the lady at a red light. The delicious irony of the moment was tempered a bit by the knowledge that it was likely lost on Heidi Hurry.
I spent a year riding over hill and dale, through town and county, in all kinds of weather. In that time, I saw drivers perform feats of daring, not to say stupidity, that looked like things you’d see in a movie, e.g., a motorcyclist weaving in and out of heavy traffic at high speed; drivers sweeping across four lanes of interstate at rush hour, no pauses, no signal lights–veritably swinging across like Tarzan on a vine. I saw mothers with car-seated infants strapped in the front seat, their back seat piled with junk. Was Jesus tempted to turn stones to bread? I saw drivers cheerfully changing red to green, ignoring caution lights, running stop lights two and three at a time. I saw left on red. I saw parking lots doubling for highways. I saw a head-on collision with a light pole. And everywhere, in all kinds of traffic, at high rates of speed, I saw drivers with a fistful of wheel and a handful of cell phone. That’s the short list.
Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present for your amusement, edification, and hospitalization, the daring, the defiant, the willful; the heedless, reckless, and stupid…American motorist!
The man who trained me for driver’s ed was a brash little guy who began every new driving class with this dictum: “Lesson Number One: Everyone’s a moron.” The corollary to this came with his next statement: “What’s that make you? A moron in training.” That may sound harsh, but, in the years since, having seen so much moronic driving, I’ve wondered how much of our vaunted teaching really sticks? That’s the sad part.
The other, more interesting part, the “enlightening” mentioned above, came as I realized that much of what we see on the road is a stark display of none other than human sin. For years, now, I’ve been telling the people to whom I preach that, if I believed nothing else in the Bible, I would believe in sin. It’s real. It’s s universal. It’s deadly. Any internal quibbling I might’ve entertained beforehand was wiped away by my year of living dangerously.
What is a car to us? It’s not just a means of getting from place to place, is it? It’s power! We zip ourselves up in these two-ton suits of steel, rubber, and glass, and then weeee…EXPRESS OURSELVES! Again I tell you, if I believed in nothing else the Bible taught, I’d believe in human sin—because I’ve watched it through the windshield! I’ve seen pride and arrogance, childish impatience at one end, downright nastiness on the other. For our cars are power and, as Abraham Lincoln said, give a person power and you’ll find out what he’s made of.
I don’t know, though, whether to laugh or cry at my great theological discovery. On the one hand, it’s rather heartening for this sometimes doubtful preacher to see so many drivers taking a yellow highlighter to important Bible passages.
On the other hand…sigh… On the other hand, I got mad this morning at a fellow driver for whipping in front of me in the drive-thru at Tim Hortons.
Talk about driver’s education.
