Do Your Part

Keep your hands on that wheel.

I am working through a complex concept. I realize as I am doing so that some monk in the mountains of Tibet probably has this already figured out. If I get an audience with the Dalai Lama, this will be my question. “Should I let Jesus take the Wheel?”

To help me think this through I came up with a metaphor. My yard.

My yard is a hopeless never ending dismal failure. It is much like life. Doomed to ultimately fail. However, I can, if I put the effort in, get some enjoyment out of it. That is until it falls into disarray again and I am back out there ready to work hard for my reward. So with this metaphor, let me recap where I am at with my entire week analyzing Mrs. Underwood’s proposition.

Option 1 – Completely surrender my yard to God’s will and throw up my hands. This is the “Jesus, take the Wheel,” proposition. Perhaps. I am confused on that, currently. However, for consideration this would be me deciding all my efforts are not working and just declaring that I am going to trust God to figure it out.

Option 1 is interesting, because there are two modes of thinking as I have discovered in my personal analysis.

Option 2 – Surrender my yard, but with a deterministic attitude. This would be to adopt the same mentality but to throw up my hands with the notion that it does not matter what I do. God, or the fates, have predetermined what is going to happen with my yard. It will be what it is determined to be. So what I do has no consequence, and how could I arrogantly thing otherwise?

Option 3 – Surrender the yard’s outcome to God, but work really hard at it anyway. This is still having trust or faith that God will take care of the parts out of my control, yet I need to have faith to do what is under my control. I still need to water, fertilize, pull weeds, fix problems with the sprinklers.

Option 4 – Ask for help, but know full well that the outcome is going to based entirely on my efforts. This is the mode of thinking that I have historically been the most likely to believe. There is no way, I am taking my hands of the wheel. Forget it. If I want a good yard, it is going to come by the sweat of my brow. End of Story.

This exercise this week, has convinced me the foolish option (option 1) is rightly not a good idea. My yard will not be better without some of my involvement. Option 2, the fatalist. This is not going to work. My neighbor’s yard looks awesome, because I see him working on it everyday. He may or may not believe in God, but the key ingredient is his effort. Option 4 seems to be the practical view, but I am realizing now that there is power in option 3. Rather then stress out about how lame my yard is, I can trust that God will figure it out and get busy working on what I can actually improve today.

So, Mrs. Underwood was wrong. Option 1 is foolish, but I will take modified approach. The single mom needs to keep her hands on the wheel, and trust that if she has faith in God, she will not end up upside down in a ditch on highway 40.

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