Jockeying For Position In the Snow

A few months ago I was driving through a massive snow storm early one morning and noted an interesting phenomenon.

We all seemed to be travelling at an extremely consistent speed. We didn't have spurts of high speed nor momentary backups that took us down to a crawling pace.

We just seemed, all of us cars, to be puttering along through the driving snow at a pretty steady pace of maybe 40 mph or so.

This puzzled me, because there was no obvious cause for this regularity that I could see. In fact, during the whole time I saw cars jockeying for position successfully, making their way past me and on into the distance beyond my field of vision in the driving snow.

I'm not proud of the fact, but I got a bit jealous of those faster cars. In fact, I was tempted to join them.

I nearly did.

The pack I was in was going 40 mph or so, but 45 or 50 mph sounded pretty good to me right about then. I had things to do, places to be...

Sooner sounded good.

I have more than my share of stupid moments, but on this day I turned my back on such thoughts. Lane changing in these conditions simply couldn't be justified. Not to add just a few mph to my travel pace. I had family at home and reasons to not put my life on the line for the sake of shaving a few minutes off my travel time.

So there I was, plugging along, when suddenly through the swirling snow a new vista broke into my line of vision. I began to realize that there were snow plows ahead of me. They had been too far ahead for me to see at first, but now they were visible. There were 3 or 4 of them - as many plows as lanes.

And they were next to each other.

I began to reflect on the logical implications of this arrangement and found myself chuckling in my thoughts at the tragic comedy being played out in front of the hood of my car.

Chicago had been knocked flat with snow, and it was quite literally impossible to get around the plows. Not even the wildest lawbreaker would ever venture out of the lanes through six inches of snow at high speed to go around a plow. Not successfully, at any rate. Never.

So every car on that freeway had an upper limit, as it were. NOBODY was going to get past those plows.

Yet here we had a surprising number of enterprising drivers doing what they did to get past me in the first place: driving dangerously.

These yahoos were literally one slip away from disastrous end, and by their very actions dramatically improving their odds of meeting it.

For what?

It occurred to me that it was all a bit like life.

If we relax behind the plows, the drive will be smoother. We'll likely exit peacefully too.

Or we can we make the journey stressful and dangerous for both ourselves and those around us.

And for all that trouble? We'll never pass the plows ahead of us.

We're pretty stupid, us humans.

Matthew 6:25-34
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.