Road Sins

          What’s your RSQ? Your Road Sins Quotient? I’ve found myself capable of at least four major sin problems as a driver, both short distance and long. I’ve said before that you can measure where you are spiritually by how you react under stress. If you want a really good measure of your walk with God, practice some self examination behind the wheel.

Anger

         Anger is not a sin. What we do with our anger or our reasons for it can be. Problems related to anger are the most noticeable Road Sins. They can range from frustration, to name calling (with the kids listening in the back seat), to inappropriate hand signs. For most of us it doesn’t get worse than that, but the media have a name for when it does: “road rage.” But, that we get angry at all is a potential sign of spiritual problems. It shows us lacking in self control, and it shows that we expect things in life to always go the way we want them to—as if God’s refusal to let us control our own lives (including every driver and vehicle around us) is an insult to us. I’ll come back to this problem of control.

Greed

          The road is a great place for me to face my materialistic side. From the dozens of overpriced impulse buys screaming for my attention at gas station convenience stores to the unusual offerings which pass before my eyes as I browse the Cracker Barrel gift shop, I fight or give into the urge to buy something I never would have picked up in any other circumstance. These are things I’ll either add to my waist in calories or end up throwing into a garage sale pile six months after a trip.

Hypocrisy

          Here are some specific sins of the road we hate: speeding—especially when someone comes right up on us and flashes us to move out of the way when we’re already doing five miles over the speed limit; tail gate riding—we just want to scream “back off!” at the guy; the driver who forgets to use his blinker; the driver who forgets to turn his blinker off for twenty miles; the person who cuts us off; the person who makes us miss the light because he’s turning left where there’s no left turn lane. And the list goes on. But our great hypocrisy is getting angry at people for doing all these things when we have done them all ourselves as well. Our anger or even mild lack of patience toward people doing things we’ve done ourselves is pure hypocrisy, a sin which Jesus strongly condemned (see Matthew 23:13-29 and Luke 12:1-3).

Taking Control

         Our worst Road Sins are those which put ourselves in the place of God. The first way in which we do this is by leaving God out on road trips: prayer time disappears, Bible reading disappears, and church attendance? On a vacation? Forget about it! I’m completely guilty of this. But worse still is our tendency to make car-time into control time. A car is an American’s method of controlling his life (this is why we get so angry when things on the road don’t go exactly our way). We use cars to control our careers, our appointments, our plans, our recreations, our vacations, our church attendance, and, over all, our time. Cars allow us to take ownership of our time and our lives. Like all technology, they can be a tool for good things or bad, but they can too easily be a tool for replacing god, for controlling things which might be better left to Him. Today it’s no difficult thing for an American in the Midwest to say, “Tomorrow I’m taking off for California and plan to be there in three days” (and it can usually be done). A century ago that would’ve been unheard of. More importantly, this sense of false control over our lives which cars give us is a direct violation of scripture, as James says:

Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:13-16)