Driver's-license living

There must be an unwritten rule at the Department of Licensing that all photos taken for driver’s licenses be as ugly as possible. My current license photo looks like a desperate woman who is either a mother of teething triplets or who just learned her credit card was hacked and thousands in charges made in some Caribbean Island.

            I really tried to have a smiling visage for it. As I stepped to the line for photos, I put on my most pleasant face, with a smile that was neither too phony nor too hesitant. When the clerk said “okay” and I heard a click, I thought he meant he’d taken it, and I relaxed. Then the lights popped, capturing the prize droopy-faced mug shot of the day.

            Whenever I have to show my I.D., I say, “That’s really me. You know the DOL.”  Most nod agreement.

            For all the jokes about driver’s licenses, I came upon a simple but profound use of them in describing the spiritual life. I recently read Scot McKnight’s The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others (Paraclete Press). He covers a lot of territory about what it means to be a Christian, building off how Christ transformed the Old Testament rule of life known as the shema from Deut. 6:4-5 about loving God with one’s heart, soul, mind and strength. Christ amended it to include loving one’s neighbor as oneself (Lev. 19:18). He calls this new spiritual mindset “the Jesus Creed.”

            McKnight uses analogies from ordinary life, and in chapter 10, when he traces the life of Peter, he talks about different views of conversion. “The Jesus Creed,” he writes, “is more like a driver’s license than a birth certificate.”  The birth certificate proves we were born at a certain time and location, but the driver’s license gives us permission to operate a vehicle. He likens “birth certificate-only” Christians to babies who need to be pushed around in strollers. But the “driver’s license” view produces adults who can operate on life’s roads.

            Learning to drive a car isn’t easy! It’s especially challenging for adolescents, whose brains aren’t mature enough for all the decision-making involved in traffic situations. Yet that’s when many seek licenses as some sort of rite of passage in our culture. I was a late-to-learn driver, back when driver’s education wasn’t pushed in the schools. By then in college, I’d gotten a summer job that required driving. Dad coached me on the basics, and when I barely missed a fire hydrant a block from home, he turned my training over to my mother. I probably aged her early.

            After your license gives you official permission to be on the road, you continue to acquire driving skills. Similarly, conversion is a progression of spiritual understanding. McKnight calls it “a lifelong series of gentle (or noisy) nods of the soul” (p. 96). We don’t know it all upon asking Christ into our lives. Learning to live as He did takes all our lives.

            In driving, unfortunately for many, that first accident or near-miss is part of the learning process of sharing the road. In the spiritual realm, life-learning is often connected to some sort of affliction. Robert Murray McCheyne, the Scottish preacher mentioned in last week’s blog, made this wise observation: “Affliction brings out graces that cannot be seen in a time of health. It is the treading of the grapes that brings out the sweet juices of the vine; so it is affliction that draws forth submission, weanedness from the world, and complete rest in God.”

            By the way, that lousy photo I.D. from the Department of Licensing doesn’t come under the umbrella of “life afflictions.” Amusements, maybe…