Driving home the Gospel.

What’s the absolute best driving scenario you can imagine?

Although you may be tempted to say, “empty road except for me,” that’s not quite true. See, the absence of other people to interfere with us is certainly nice in object-attainment scenarios, but it’s not the best, mainly because it reinforces our idea that other people are a problem to be avoided or overcome. The even better driving scenario would be having all the other drivers cooperate with you as if they were your friends: moving out of your way, accommodating your mistakes, and giving you plenty of space if you happen to be impeding them somehow.

I know it’s rare, but when people drive like this, it makes driving fun because we feel like they’re actively helping us. In short, we’d all love other drivers to do this unto us, right? So, as Christians who supposedly believe the Golden Rule, what if we actively tried to drive like this?

Well, just for fun, I gave it a shot this morning, and it was tremendously satisfying. As “gift-giver” rather than “rule-enforcer” or “self-righteous-defender-of-my-rights,” I felt unusually peaceful and even empowered by imagining the fleeting happiness I might be giving my highway neighbors.

It only took 24 years of driving, 14 years of being a Christian, and 5 years of fanatically over-thinking the ethics of driving to come up with this. Ah, the speed of human insight!