Grace on the road

I must begin with a confession. When I’m driving in town I often feel irritated at the number of bikes on the roads. It’s indisputable that their presence makes driving slower and trickier.

But I’ve no doubt that if I were riding one of those bikes I would have at least an equal sense of irritation at cars and lorries tailgating, or buffeting me with their slipstream as they pass too fast and too close.

So how do I react to this irritation? By reminding myself that these folks on bikes are every bit as entitled to be on the road as I am, and seeking to drive with calmness and grace – although sometimes, irritation trumps grace.

There’s a general Christian principle here. Perhaps in some of our lives goodness and grace flow spontaneously, but for many of us facing stressful and irritating situations its more that grace beckons us, and we have to choose to act in grace rather than being overcome by irritation.

The busy roads of Inverness, crowded with cars, cycles, vans and pedestrians remind me of the road of life – many individuals, each unique, all on a journey – and of the road of Christian life where people travel together to a shared destination.

It’s easy to focus on differences between us and our fellow travellers rather than on all we have in common. Our Christian fellow-travellers will have different personalities and beliefs, different spiritual experiences and styles of worship. We each travel at our own pace on the journey, some seeking to linger in the past, others to run and embrace the coming future. These differences often lead to irritation with one another.

On the roads, we find ourselves objectifying our fellow-travellers. Some drivers and cyclists  regard one another as ‘the enemy.’ On the roads we see car-drivers acting with a contempt and disregard for cyclists which we rarely see when people meet face to face, eyeball to eyeball as fellow human beings.

The same attitude is prevalent on the road of life and the road of church life. There is a tendency to dehumanise those who we perceive as not ‘like us’, to label them as ‘troublemakers’, ‘liberals’, ‘traditionalists’ or ‘just plain wrong.’

On the roads we can be divided by a mutual sense of superiority. The cyclist feels, with good reason, that she is contributing to the care of the planet and reducing her carbon tyre-print; some motorists (much less worthily) think about entitlement. ‘I can afford a big car’; ‘I’m in a hurry’; ‘My tax pays for this road.’

It’s the same on the road of life, and of church life. I may imagine that my views are inherently better than someone else’s, or that I have greater entitlement to have my voice heard and heeded.

On the roads, it’s easy to highlight the failures of others while ignoring our own errors. Drivers are indignant when cyclists jump the red lights, or use the pavement to by-pass obstructions. But is that indignation fuelled by an envy at the cyclists’ freedom, and by hurt pride, the knowledge that we are impotent until the lights change? Are we ignoring our own red-light jumps and our dangerous overtaking?

We must learn on the physical and metaphorical roads of life to drive with grace, respecting other travellers, quick to acknowledge our own faults, slow to judge others.

My wife’s church is developing a ‘culture of honour’ – each member encouraged to live out of a deep respect for one another while acknowledging difference and disagreements. Perhaps as we need more cycle tracks beside our roads so we need in church life to devise ways of allowing people to travel at their own speed, journeying together while remaining true to their unique personalities.

My daughters tell me I’m too hesitant a driver, not decisive enough when, for example, approaching roundabouts. And if I were a cyclist with a queue of cars behind me, I’d strongly feel like jumping on the pavement and waving them all past. We need to travel with grace, but with a sense of joy and confidence in our right to be on the road rather than making a virtue of indecisive hesitance and calling it ‘grace.’

It’s easy to think it’s gracious to give in to the view of others in church, trying to be what we think these folk want us to be. But we are God’s unique, precious children. If I’m one of God’s cyclists, then I need to learn to ride my bike with a humble pride.

And on our journeys, we need more of those 20mph limits. More time for stilling our hearts and walking slow, and finding in the God who meets us in our hearts the grace we need for that days travelling.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 7th May 2015)