Lessons behind the wheel

Did you hear the one about the guy who was invited to a feast and took the best seat at the table, only to be asked to move down a few chairs because someone more important than he had shown up (Luke 14:7-11)? That was me at Fairmount Park last Sunday.

I was trying to find my son's baseball game in this maze of a park that sprawls Philadelphia, and it was not my turf, so I was lost and driving like a lost person. I am normally lead-footed and cocky behind the wheel, bobbing and weaving through traffic with ease like the daring young man on the flying trapeze. I am the person looking down on people who hesitate at green lights and crawl at the speed limit and generally drive like foreigners.

You may have heard of Philadelphia sports fans. (Think Liverpool soccer fans on steroids.) Well, they also drive cars. And it seems that they were all out at Fairmount Park instead of Citizens Bank Park on an unseasonably warm April Sunday. As I became the hunted rather than the hunter, as I stepped down from the seat of scoffers to the seat of the scoffed at, I did some repenting and said "Lord, please give me a lowly heart."

There have been many other such incidents in my life. But pride, like corrosion on a car battery, tends to work its way back up unawares. Here is the goal: "humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love" (Ephesians 4:2). It is the safest place; it is the place of reality. How many times must I be demoted before it sticks?

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