Today I got the pleasure of driving Amy’s new car. I had to take it to the garage for some routine maintenance. One of the cool things about this vehicle ( which may be standard on all vehicles now!), is that although it’s an automatic transmission, you can put it in a full manual mode. Yeah, instead of having L1 and L2, it has an M on the drive shaft. And when you put it in M, you can control the shifting yourself.
So on the way in today, I decided to place it in M and see how well I could do. Well, it’s a wonder I did not have to have some transmission work done by the time I got to the garage!!! Ok, not really, I did fine, but I could tell you this, I don’t usually drive a manual transmission, and both I felt totally out of control, instead of totally in control as I guess you are supposed to feel with a manual transmission.
Of course, this made my mind wander right over to a half-baked analogy. I immediately thought about how we want so bad to be in control of our lives so much that we shift it right on down to M and have at it. Only to realize that we really don’t know what we are doing and end up tearing stuff up. Life can be so much better when we set the transmission on automatic, and let the spirit handling the shifting for us.
Yes, I know, this is really close to the whole “Jesus Take the Wheel” thing, and the analogy, if taking too far, can really start to break down. It’s not perfect, but hang with me and get the point! And that point today is that when we run are lives completely on manual, we usually end up making some bad decisions on when to shift and those decisions usually have unintended consequences.
14 For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. Romans 8:14 NIV
Who is doing the shifting for you today?