My eyelids were heavy as my wife, Karen, called me, while she remained transfixed on the computer screen. She had been working on our upcoming vacation plan for days.
“I read all the online reviews about this place, and they highly recommend this hike, which will take a couple of hours. But, we only have two days there, and we also have to go to the lake for the sunset, and I heard that the boat ride is good, but it’s expensive, and I can’t decide whether to do the boat ride or the horseback riding, and if we do this on the second day, you’ll have to drive two hours at night in the dark, but the boat does not run on the first day…what do you think?”
I can’t remember what I said…probably something along the lines of, “Whatever you think is best, Honey. I trust your judgment. It doesn’t really matter anymore what we end up doing, I’ll make sure that I enjoy it no matter what.”
Karen is often described as one who is very high in “uncertainty avoidance.” When she wants to visit a new place, she would read reviews on multiple web sites regarding what are the best attractions there, and then research every single option in painstaking detail. She would weigh the pluses and minuses of every conceivable option to the point of exhaustion, make a choice, and then rescind her choice as soon as she finds out more information that was overlooked, to start the process all over again. I often wonder how much more time she spends preparing for a trip than actually taking the trip itself. I used to be the one who planned our family vacations, but eventually chose to take the wise path, and allowed my wife to do the work instead, as she found my lack of attention to detail in these matters intolerable.
The result of such meticulous planning is that our vacation experience tends to be, more or less, exactly what Karen planned. The trips were wonderful, but the process of getting there seemed anything but.
This picture of a family vacation seemed in stark contrast to my memories of family travels as a young child. My parents would put my brother and me in the back seat of the car, and our journeys would start with me knowing very little about where we were going. We would have picnics on the grass, stop for restroom breaks while my dad paid for gas at the service station, eat pancakes for dinner, go to museums, play at the park, pose for pictures, and listen to my dad explain something that made him sound very smart and me feel very proud of having a smart dad. I had a rough idea of what we were doing and seeing, but I did not have to worry about the trips, and I had a wonderful time. I’m sure that my parents spent plenty of hours planning these vacations, but it was none of my concern. I was a backseat sojourner.
We often approach life in the same way that some of us do vacations, in that we try to plan for everything, including details on what school we want to attend, the kind of person we want to marry, at precisely what age we want to have children and how many, what kind of job we want and how much money we want to make, how many years we want to work and where we want to spend our golden years. If we could, we would have planned the same for our children as well. We view our lives with the delusion that we are in control, not realizing that our very breath is utterly dependent on God. We act like children in the back seat of the car, pretending to be holding the steering wheel and making the car move. Unfortunately, we then become angry, anxious and/or fearful when life eventually goes off-course, and our lives become unraveled because things somehow don’t go as planned. We forget that only God is truly in control of our destiny:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:13-16)
May we embrace God’s wisdom for our lives, and trust in His sense of direction. There is joy and adventure in being a backseat sojourner.
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