I attended another meeting of our County memoir writing group last month. While you can’t really call what I came up with a memoir, it is an experience I’ve thought of many times over the years but had never written down until now. Here it is:
I was probably about 21, give or take, and living at home. An extra car was needed at home on this particular day so Dad agreed to take the bus to work. But the bus stop was at the Mall which was 2 or 3 miles away and so Dad, always the early riser, woke me before sunup to drive him to the bus. Even though I was quite familiar with the road, I was barely creeping along because it was an extremely foggy morning. It was still dark out and the headlights only reflected off the fog in front of me making it even harder to see. When I finally turned onto State Street, I found myself peering over the steering wheel straight down at the lines on the road so that I knew I was staying in my lane. We crept along like this for a while before Dad offered his advice.
“Look up,” he said.
“What?” I wasn’t going to look up or I wouldn’t be able to see anything.
“Look up,” he calmly replied. Then he added, “If you look up, you can see the street lights. They are bright enough that you can see much farther ahead.
Cautiously, I looked up. Sure enough, I could see 3 street lights straight ahead, pointing the way to go. It was amazing how free I became to speed up and drive with more confidence. Soon we came to the traffic light signaling that we had reached the mall. There were a lot of lights now, scattered around the parking lot, and I easily found the bus stop and waited with Dad until the bus came.
By the time I left, the fog had lifted enough that the drive home wasn’t nearly as scary, but I would have been okay anyway since I’d learned to look for the lights.
Many times in the years since my foggy drive to the bus stop, I’ve thought of this experience and reflected on the analogy. We are creeping through life, sometimes frightened of where the next step will take us or unsure of what is around a curve in our journey. We continue on like this, getting by — until we are encouraged to look up. It is frightening to take our eyes off the road. What if we crash? What if we lose our way? But we do it. We look up. And we see the light. We see His light and realize that there is a better way. We don’t have to creep along unknowing any longer. We follow His light and find freedom we have never known. Suddenly our perspective has changed and we understand things we didn’t understand before. We are aware of possibilities we never knew existed until now. And all because we trusted Him enough to look up and follow His light.
