Christian Living

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I was in my fourth year (what I call my "first senior year," since I had two of them) of college when I realized I had a problem following God. I knew what he wanted me to do, and I just didn't feel like doing it. I kept watching opportunities pass me by, things that I really wanted to be a part of, but couldn't because I refused to get off my duff and obey God. One of my minors in college was political science, and as a result of studying government and laws, I became very perplexed by the frequency with which Christians ignore laws, especially the speed limit. I don't know anyone besides my dad who really makes a serious attempt to obey the speed limit all the time. Much to my dismay, I felt an odd compulsion to try driving the speed limit. I felt like God was telling me that, if I couldn't obey the speed limit which was pretty easy to follow, I had no hope at all of following him when he tried to get me to do something really difficult. I felt like following the speed limit would be good practice for following God.

I've always been a pretty mellow driver. I've had my driver's license for over ten years now and I have yet to get a single speeding ticket. I'm also a contrarian. I like doing things that nobody else does, purely because nobody else is doing them. Since I don't know anyone who follows the speed limit meticulously, that little mischievous part of me was greatly attracted to the idea of trying it.

Let me tell you, cruise control became my best friend. If it weren't for cruise, I never would have managed. I have quite a vivid memory of going down a long street in the town where I went to college, where the road was straight and flat but the speed limit, for some inexplicable reason, was 25. There I was, cruise control stubbornly on 25, a line of fifteen cars behind me getting annoyed. I think you can tell a lot about someone by how they react to a slow driver in front of them, and I learned a lot about the people behind me, like which hand they favor when giving the finger, and whether the pitch of their horn is a B or more of a C-sharp.

It was a long year, and not just because it took me an absurdly long time to get to all the places I was driving during that year. I didn't like doing the speed limit any more than the people behind me liked it. I chafed; I got impatient; I got resentful. But I made myself obey. And you know the crazy thing? It really did help me. I got a lot more obedient to God over that period of time. At the end of the year, when I felt God calling me to move to Texas and go to seminary, with no guarantee of a job or a place to live, I listened. When I got down there and he thrust me into youth ministry, where I felt terribly out of my league, and worship ministry, which made me so nervous that my knees visibly shook every time I got on stage, I obeyed. Those opportunities weren't passing me by anymore. I was ready for them, because I understood what it meant to obey.

Let me say here that I'm not recommending this exercise to everyone. I do think there's a lot of hypocrisy involved when Christians talk about obeying an eternal God and can't obey two black numbers on a white sign, but it's not my job to convict you of that. Really, I think one of the worst mistakes we can make when talking about spiritual growth is assuming that whatever worked for me will work equally well for you. I did this because I felt like it was important to me, for where I was at that point in time. You should do what you believe God wants you to do, not what people on the Internet tell you to do. But I digress.

I don't know exactly how long I followed the speed limit. I still follow it for the most part, but I stopped the experiment after I felt like I'd learned my lesson from it. In my opinion, that's always the best time to stop this kind of exercise, because if you do it for too long, it will take over, and suddenly your focus will become the exercise itself rather than whatever you were supposed to learn from it.

The most important lesson we're supposed to learn in life is how to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and how to love our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus said that these two were the most important things in the whole Bible, and that if you can do them, you will automatically follow all the other rules and laws by default. The problem is that most of the time, the Right Thing to Do is the opposite of the thing we want to do. Giving money to the needy involves having less money for myself. Forgiving people means giving up my right to hold a grudge. If you're not good at obedience, if you can't make yourself do something that you don't really want to do, then you don't have much chance of loving God or loving other people.

It wasn't really the speed limit itself that showed all this to me; it was my attitude toward the speed limit, that "I should be able to do what I want whenever I want," which showed that I cared more about myself than about God. It should have been, "I am able to do what God wants whenever God wants." I believe that the life God has in store for me is the better than the life I could create for myself, so if I'm not following God, the only person I'm hurting is me. A lot of the things that God wants are difficult - I feel like they're hurting me, which is the reason I don't do them. But that's why I had to learn obedience.

I don't know where you are in your spiritual walk, if you figured this stuff out a long time ago or if you're basically living your own life and wondering why God doesn't bless you more. I won't presume to lecture you, but I will say that obedience is a beautiful thing. There's a great light bulb moment when you realize that God really does know what he's talking about, and that the most beautiful things in life come to you when you are obedient in loving him and loving other people.

I hope you'll remember that the next time you're stuck behind me while I'm doing the speed limit.

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