Some things that used to make me mad, finally just started irritating
me and now many of those things actually amuse me. One of them is cars and horns. I understand the horn was added to the
vehicle as a warning devise but it just doesn’t seem like a good defensive
devise. Watch in a convenient store or
shopping center parking lot sometime and you will see people start backing out
without seeing a car coming (no judgment here, there are blind spots,
distractions and sometimes just blindness).
The car in the right-of way often will just stop and lay on the horn as
if the use of that two pound device all by itself is going to stop the backing
car. Three lanes on a highway and a
vehicle tries to change lanes not seeing that the lane they desire is already
taken. The car in danger glares and
hoooooooonks as the only action of defense instead of immediately changing
lanes that is empty beside them.
Yesterday I was traveling down Mack, west of I74, hoping to
intersect with Gratiot. The Tigers had
just finished an afternoon game and thousands of fans were adding to the normal
rush hour congestion on Interstate 75 and 64 so I was taking a detour. There was one car in front of me and we were
coming to a red light. I saw the
Semi-Truck that we were going to intersect with and felt he was going to turn
left and would need extra room since both of the streets were only two
lane. I stopped to where the truck
would have plenty of room but the driver
in front of me didn’t and pulled up passed the white line (something that hasn’t
yet become an amusement) and stopped as the light had turned red.
The truck made the turn but had to get up on the curb to do
it. As the twenty feet of Semi passed
her and the forty foot of trailer tried to follow it was clear that the car in
front of me was in trouble. Remember I
have stopped with what was probably fifty or so feet between us. As the rear wheels of the trailer got closer
and closer to the car the horn started to do everything it could to stop that
semi-trailer from climbing up the hood of the car. The truck driver stopped, backed up, pulled
forward and repeated the process until the trailer would pass by the car within
a foot or so.
When I was a boy and worked with the men I learned quickly
that when I was in an alley and calves were coming down it was much smarter for
me to move than to yell. If I took a
defensive action by crawling through the bars or even climbing up the bars,
which was more fun, I avoided the disaster of being run over. I could stand there and yell until I couldn’t
yell anymore and I would probably have been trampled.
Life is like that sometime, well maybe, no probably many
times life is like that. There may be
some things in our life that are dangers to us but instead of putting the car
in reverse and backing up or changing lanes we set our jaws and lay on the horn
of life and expect things to change.
After all this was our lane, our right-of-way and we are not going to
give up what was ours and change no matter what the end result might be. The priestly writer of Hebrews encourages us
to “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily
entangles. And let us run with perseverance
the race marked out for us. . . “ (Hebrews 12:1)
Just like I had given the car in front of me plenty of room
to back up and avoid the danger of getting run over God always gives us another
direction and the ability to throw those things off that which hinders us from
being the people He wants us to be. But,
we have to do it. May each of us find
the strength to do that and continue to run our race.
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