Towed Backwards

Do you ever feel like you are being towed backwards? 

Ok, here's what I mean. You know when a car is being towed by a tow truck, and its back wheels are up with the nose of the car facing down towards the road - the car is being towed backwards. 

Sometimes I feel like I am sitting in the driver's seat of the car that is facing down into the road, speeding away on the back of a tow truck. I am sitting there, looking straight down at the asphalt as it disappears, and I am completely *not* in control of my life. I feel like God is driving the tow truck, taking me who knows where, at who knows what speed, with who knows what obstacles in the way - and I can't do anything to stop it! 

And I ask God, "WHY?" Full of anxiety and distress, pain and disillusionment, I don't understand why He has to take me to new, unexpected places in life that don't seem to be leading anywhere. 

I say, "I don't have that job, yet!"

"I don't have a car to get there, yet!"

"I don't have the money for that, yet!"

"I don't have the time for that, yet!"

"I am not prepared for that, yet!"

"I am just not, not, not, not..."

Those are only a few examples of how I often live my life, staring down into the asphalt. 

But God doesn't want me to live my life like that. He doesn't want me to continue to live in that towed car, completely turned around and facing down - with me living in this illusion that I have some kind of control over my life, in the driver's seat of a broken car. He has symbolically given me a way to get out of that driver's seat, a cell phone to call Him at any point. At any point in my life journey, I can *choose* to call Him, the tow truck driver, and ask Him to pull over. 

To ask Him to let me sit in the passenger seat next to Him.

Where I am still utterly *not* in control. But where I am acknowledging my dependence on Him, the driver. 

Not sitting in my own *illusion* of control in the driver's seat in the towed car.

Because I am too proud to trust my life and my decisions to Him, to open my Bible and pray, to choose to see His plan for my life, I far too often choose the reverse-facing, broken down car, driver's seat life position. 

And, you might say, "This whole cell phone thing...it just sounds way too 
simple and easy. Life's not like that! God doesn't just give everyone a cell phone to release them from a narrow-minded, stressful and constrained, reverse-facing-the-asphalt life!"

But He *does* give us all a cell phone to call Him: His Word. His Spirit. Prayer.

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"Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." 
- Matthew 28:16-20
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The moment I choose to see the people around me as He does, as His children and His beloved, I have succeeded in reaching God on my rhetorical cell phone. 

Because, all of a sudden, I can see beyond my own problems. I can see out in front of the tow truck now, with my life spread out before me. And instead of being distracted by my own stresses and complaints, I see that my life is full of *other* people. The busy woman next to me at the coffee shop, the depressed guy at work, the abused child at school - all of those who are still living in their own, personal reverse-facing car, facing their own asphalt.

And I am being called deeper, to love them and show them how God is already in charge, driving the tow truck. All they have to do is call Him. 

Call Him, and trust Him.