Driving Lessons

I haven’t written anything at all on this blog for quite some time, so I thought I’d try my hand at some fiction: 

My mother-in-law was driving the car when the world changed forever.  The cruise control was on as we flew over a patch of black ice.  I had been in the back seat in between my twin boys, one of whom had hit the other in the face with his rattle.  I remember how grating the crying had been on my ears, but I imagine it was only because I had had such little sleep. Upon recollection,  I can’t see why it was so bad.  I would give anything to hear that crying again.

But it wasn’t to be.  The car flew off the road and into a tree where we waited for half an hour for another car to pass and help us. My mother-in-law suffered a few broken bones, as did I.  But my boys were too young, and the force of the impact killed them both instantly.  And I sat for half an hour, pinned between the carseats, knowing they were dead.

My husband was on business in Japan, and I had to be the one to tell him that he would never hold our sons again. It nearly tore the entire family apart.  He refused to speak to his mother for quite some time, and he could barely look at me.  It was hard to look at him because every time I saw his eyes, I saw the eyes of Elijah and Noah.  When I looked at my husband, I was looking into the face of Loss itself.

The pain of losing my boys never left, but it did change.  Life carried on, and our marriage carried on.  And, in time we found ourselves talking of having children again.  Five years after the accident, I gave birth to Lily, and we were joyful for the first time in what felt like centuries.

As she grew up, we told her about her brothers, but could never say how they died, and every time we took her for a car ride, we never mentioned the boys. We were careful, and perhaps overly cautious.

When Lily was 15, her father passed away.  My world had shattered once again, shattered like the tinkling glass of the windshield that he went through.  For all of our carefulness, it seemed like we couldn’t escape the confines of all the cars that seemed for all the world like so many coffins.

Lily had doted on her father, and she missed him terribly, but we clung to each other in the midst of our pain and grew closer because of it.

I decided that I was going to teach her how to drive, that it would be the most grueling experience of her life up to that point.  If nobody else lived, it would be her, and I would be the one to show her. I would show her because I was the only one left, the only one never in the driver’s seat when worlds collapsed.

I took her everywhere–gridlocked cities, icy boulevards, hairpin turns on mountainsides, and she performed beautifully.  With each passing day, I became more and more reassured that she would make it.

One day, she hit a rabbit that was trying to cross the road.  It appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and she screamed and started to cry when she hit it.

“Pull over,” I said to her.  The country road we were on had a soft shoulder, and she coasted easily over and shut off the engine.

“If you’re crying in the driver’s seat, you won’t be able to see well enough to keep going.  You’ve gotta pull over when that happens.”  I was facing her, and she had her head in her hands. Lily nodded in agreement with me, and we sat in the car for a while as she pulled herself together.  And we kept going, knowing once again the dark feeling of life lost.

The day before her 16th birthday, I had planned the ultimate driving test–one that would require as much from me as it did from her, if not more.   I clicked myself into the passenger seat, and she asked me where we were going.  I told her to head East and get on the main road to Chicago.

About 10 minutes into our journey, I began the story.  “Your grandma was driving, and it had been so long since I had slept…”

By the time we got into the heart of Chicago, my daughter was in tears.  I directed her around tight city corners and she kept saying, “I need to find a place to park. Where can I park, so I can cry?”

But there was no place to park.  The city was packed, the few spaces along the streets had been taken up, and we had no change for a parking meter anyway–I had made sure of that.

“Lily, there is no place to park.  Sometimes you cry, and there’s no place to stop, so there’s only one thing to do–you have to keep going.  You have to muster up your courage and drive through the tears. Be careful, but keep going.”

I remember her half glance at me through red-rimmed eyes, the headlights of the passing cars glinting off the rivulets running down her cheeks.  She only paused for a second, but then nodded in understanding.

I knew she understood, because she never once had an accident.  She had many more tears, many more nights of hot cheeks and puffy eyes, more close calls and more hardship.  And, she had even more days of pure joy, more moments of ease, times of smiling and times of doting on the man she married, and later on, her children. My grandchildren.

Bless her heart, she kept driving. We both did.

A Glamorous Deception

If you are even minutely involved in modern society, you will know that kids today (I know, I’m a bit young to be saying “kids today”) are into some pretty weird stuff.  The airwaves are filled with insipid, messed-up former Disney stars, sparkly, angst-filled undead creatures, the pre-pubescent voice of post-pubescent Justin Bieber, and the graceful words of the new vernacular–“adorbs,” “cray-cray,” and “totes” (as in, “This pic of the Biebs is totes adorbs,” to which I might respond, “You’re totes cray-cray” or some version of that which isn’t insane).

I poke fun, but really, this generation is all rhyme and echo of my own. In my day (I know, I’m a bit young to be saying “in my day”), we listened to Paula Cole, BBMAK, and Cypress Hill, watched “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (apparently vamps are never out of style–just go back to Anne Rice’s novels and the first undead soap opera, “Dark Shadows”), and used words like “like” (every other word), “as if,”  and “the bomb” (as in, “Paula Cole’s like, the bomb,” to which I might reply, “As if!” if I were a valley girl).

I personally had my own brand of weirdness.  I forewent watching the traditional Saturday morning cartoons like Animaniacs and spent my morning chilling with Bob Ross’ painting shows.  I read a book a day, played basketball in the driveway and listened to the Broadway cast recording of “Evita” while rollerblading in circles for hours at a time.  I can admit it now, mostly because I’ve accepted that I was a quirky, lonely kid–and because I am no longer lonely or a kid, and my quirkiness has taken on different, cooler forms–I was uncool before uncool was cool.  However, when I was just entering my teenage years, I got involved in some things I am not proud of, one of which was the occult.  I wasn’t just in the vampire slaying crowd (though that was also a big area of interest for me), but I downloaded magical spells off the newly-created internet, researched old demon legends and Satanism (though I was a professing [read: false] Christian at the time).  I messed around with tarot cards, fortune-telling, and thought a lot about holding seances. I believed in reincarnation and a very real spiritual world–a world I knew next to nothing about.  And, true to the occult name (“occult” means “hidden”), I kept most of those things a secret from my family during the three-or-so years I was involved.

It’s interesting to me that the word “occult” means “hidden.”  When you mess with the occult, a lot of showy things can start to happen because the occult is a doorway to Satan.  I know people who’ve used Ouija boards (thankfully, I never did), and had immediate and powerful demonic encounters.  I’ve had a few of my own even without the Ouija board.  God says He’ll grant us more than we can ask or imagine, but Satan has his own brand of that promise–he’ll show us things more horrifying and more often than we asked or imagined if we open the door to him.  And, believe me–if you use the occult, you’re opening that door.

Perhaps you scoff that there is anything dangerous at all about playing with a cardboard “toy” that you can purchase at Toys R Us, or  playing with a deck of cards with a few weird symbols on them, or lighting some candles and mumbling a few words in repetition.  But if you read the Bible, you know such things have ominous meaning.  Do we really have to be so addicted to personal experience that we ignore the warnings in the Bible and the warnings of many who have tried the occult and found it scary and oppressive?

Admittedly, there have been perhaps two times in my life after my initial exploration of the occult when I have been tempted to use it again–both times after becoming a Christian.  Circumstances during those times were such that I was craving both answers and direction, and God was giving me only enough knowledge for the moment–which apparently wasn’t quite good enough for me.  God was quietly exercising my faith, and Satan loudly tried to prey on my desire for more.  Thankfully, the temptations passed, and I didn’t give in.  If you saturate yourself with the Bible, it’s easier to bear up under temptation.

I think Satan preys upon our desire for the glamorous, the showy, the obvious.  He preys upon the boredom that has come with so much ease-creating technology, and on our collective cultural desire for interesting distractions. So, he draws us in with a spectacle, a carnival, a magnificent hall of mirrors pinging objects of horror and intrigue off into an ever-narrowing stripe of infinity.  You’ll probably accumulate a lot of “interesting” stories by dabbling in the occult–probably more “interesting” than you’ll accumulate while carrying your cross behind Christ. But, if you continue down that occult path, only death lies at the end.

Then there’s God. God is glorious, but He’s not glamorous.  He has wowed me with certain experiences, but that’s the exception to the rule. God is no cheap parlor magician–His is the unchanging, still, small voice of humility, not the irresolute, loud, boastful voice of hubris.  God’s hall of mirrors shows us, but that same stripe of infinity changes our image progressively to look more and more like Christ the further into infinity we go.  It’s a path that ends (and begins) in life.  Sure, sometimes it’s not much to look at.  The way is humble, stony, thorny, and it doesn’t promise the seeming ease of other paths, but it’s really the only way to go and end where your truest heart wishes to be.

A thought grows up just as humans do. They start off fumbling, weak, small, but nourish them and they’ll grow powerful and stout as oak trees.  Starve a person, and they die.  Starve a thought, and it, too, will die.  And, if your thoughts are for spectacle, or curious for easy answers, I advise that you be very wary.  I am an extremely curious person by nature, and in younger years I gave myself carte blanche to research and learn as I wished.  Yes, I learned.  I learned that not all learning is helpful.  I learned that sometimes, a satisfied curiosity is not worth the price.  I learned that we cannot exchange the glory of the immortal God for some lesser counterfeit. Sometimes you have to let a thought simply die. Sometimes we have to learn to not be so fixated on our own entertainment. I learned that this whole idea doesn’t apply only to the occult–it applies to anything that draws you away from God, whether it be a culture that follows its every whim, an apostate teacher, or personal sinful desires. We don’t have to experience everything to learn from it, and I’m still learning this.  Wisdom can be a killer of intrigue, of glamour, of ease, of worship of  the wrong things.  And, wisdom can be life-giving.  We can get involved in some bad stuff over the course of our lives, but we don’t have to stay there.  Life, goodness, truth…all await you on the other side.